Die Upon a Kiss (40 page)

He broke off abruptly, and Tiberio’s voice continued. “No Irish knows of silence.” There was a pause. “Bring the bodies up, then go. I’ll make sure of things here, and release the girl when I leave.”

Cavallo’s voice was chilly polite. “I think we’ll take her with us.”

“As you please,” said Tiberio indifferently. “If you think you can get away unseen in her company through all the crowd in the alley. But I assure you, if she is seen— and she is difficult to miss, since everyone has been seeking her all night—everything we have done here is for naught.”

There was silence. Pushing the door open a crack, January saw them, a
tableau vivant
in the amber lamplight of the dressing-room—under whose closed outer door smoke was already beginning to curl. Two jars of paraffin stood near the daybed, on which Drusilla d’Isola lay with her hands and feet bound. Beside her, sitting up but likewise spanceled in the shimmering silk of Princess Elvira’s wedding-veils and Princess Isabella’s bright gold-and-crimson scarves, Hannibal watched the three Italians warily.

“Don’t think you can get away with this,” blustered Belaggio. His hands had been not only bound together, but tied to his ankles, leaving him toppled over beside a similarly trussed Knight on the floor. At the small table, Ponte, still furry-limbed and criss-crossed with scarlet paint, was prosaically thrusting things into a small black bag: the libretto of
Othello,
two or three green-covered books January recalled seeing in Belaggio’s office. Folded papers, presumably extracted from Knight’s pockets. His mask was thrust up onto his forehead and his large dark eyes were cold. “People will wonder, eh? When they find us tied up like this? People will ask questions. . . .”

“And people will find my body, and Bruno’s, here beside yours,” replied Cavallo. Sweaty and rumpled from the wig, his dark hair hung down over his broad pale forehead, his dark eyes. He’d pulled on trousers, but his feet were bare, as were his arms in Orpheus’s sleeveless white tunic. “So who is there to hunt? Drusilla . . .” He stepped over to her, bent to brush her forehead with his lips. “Do not think worse of us, Bruno and myself. Sometimes, to slay the tyrants, the innocent”—he nodded toward Hannibal—“must die, too. As my brother died. Please believe me that if he could be spared, he would be.”

Drusilla’s glance went from Hannibal to Cavallo, pleading, then moved on to Tiberio’s hard little gnome-like face. She wet her lips. “Take me with you now, Silvio. I won’t be trouble.”

“Don’t be afraid, Signorina,” said the stage-master in soothing tones. “I’ll see you get out safely.” Glancing at Cavallo, Tiberio added, “Shoot them and go. There’s no time. I’ll see to the girl. . . .”

Or not,
thought January,
as the case might be.

I am terribly sorry, in the dark of the stair she stumbled,
she fell, the smoke overcame her. . . .

Cavallo turned toward Knight, a silver-mounted dueling pistol in hand. “As for you,” he said quietly, “you Austrian lickspittle; you spy. One day my country and the world will be free of your kind forever. . . .”

As these words came out of Cavallo’s mouth, Bruno was already reaching for the handle of the stairway’s secret door. But the young man’s attention—as always—was on Cavallo, and when January whipped the door open, seized Bruno’s wrist, and thrust him into Shaw’s grip, Bruno was far too startled to make the slightest resistance.

It was fortunate, too, that they didn’t have any great distance to cross from the door, because the moment January opened it, Belaggio’s eyes bulged in astonished relief and he cried, “Save us . . . !” causing Cavallo to swing around, gun at the ready. . . .

“Pull that trigger an’ he’ll still die,” said Shaw, one arm hooked around Bruno’s throat, his pistol at the young man’s head.

January crossed the room in a stride, wrenched the gun from Cavallo’s hand, and ducked in the same moment, knowing Tiberio would be armed and would have no hesitation about shooting, and he was right. The Sicilian whipped a pistol from his waistband and fired, not at January, but at Knight, blowing the top of the little man’s head off and spraying gore and brains on the green silk of the wall. He flung the empty weapon in January’s face as January grabbed at him, then leapt over the daybed, snatched open the door that led onto the gallery, and whipped through like a snake and into the wall of smoke.

“Out of here!” January thrust Cavallo toward the secret stairway door, and fumbled for his knife—which he didn’t have, being still clothed in rumpled and bloody demon rags and hair-sewn tights. There were scissors on the dressing-table: he sliced through the scarves that bound d’Isola’s feet, then Hannibal’s, then Belaggio’s as the man bleated wildly.

“Me, too! Don’t leave me!
Dio,
I am fainting . . . !”

Flame billowed through the doorway with the draft of the opened door. The heat was unbelievable, a physical blow. Gasping, January dragged the impresario to his feet, shoved him after the others. As he stumbled last from the room, head swimming, he heard the roar of the paraffin jars exploding. Smoke choked the twisting stairway, smoke and hellish bronze light, and when he caught himself against the walls, they were like an oven’s, the wood itself pouring out smoke as it spiraled toward catching-heat.

Head throbbing, barely able to see, January half fell down the last steps, tripped on the tangle of corpses, was dragged through the door by hands he could barely see. “Go!” he heard Shaw yell. “. . . Gate . . . Promenade . . .”

The door transformed from blackness to a wall of fire, and January stumbled, chest heaving, into the stable yard’s flickering dark.

Somebody threw a wet sheet around his shoulders, guided him to a bench. More water was dumped over his head. He could feel his skin blistering beneath the soaked cloth. Distantly, he was conscious of other people in the fire-streaked gloom; of the gang of men pumping wildly on a fire-engine, spewing water over the wall. Of Belaggio’s babbling about how he knew nothing, nothing, of why he’d been dragged up there with that perfidious Austrian spy Knight. Of Hannibal coughing like a dying horse.

Falling timbers crashed—sparks flashed on soaked dirt and puddles. He opened his eyes and saw, like a black-and-gold painting of Rembrandt, Shaw and two of his men holding Cavallo and Ponte against the side of the stable while a third kept discreetly close behind Belaggio. Cavallo kept shaking his head. “You have no jurisdiction over me. I am not a citizen of your United States.”

“You rather I call in them what
do
have jurisdiction over you?” asked Shaw reasonably. “Which I guess would be the Austrian consul in Havana?”

January leaned back against the wall. He turned his head: Drusilla d’Isola sat beside him, ghostly in Euridice’s white grave-clothes. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

She nodded. Her face was a mess of half-melted grease-paint and soot, tracked and smeared by tears and sweat. “I heard a noise in the stairway. I was lying down after getting dressed and made up, and I went to see. It was rats, there were . . . there were two dead men down there. I came back to my dressing-room; Silvio was there . . .”

“And you left your satchel,” said January. “The satchel you carried the domino in to the Blue Ribbon Ball.”

“Oh, you found it there?” Her beautiful brows puckered. “I was looking for it. How it got there . . .”

“It had women’s things in it,” said January, and she hesitated, her frown deepening.

“How odd,” she said.

“It is.” From the hip of his ragged tights he unpinned the other thing he’d found in the stair. The tiny topaz, caught at the head of the thin gold shaft, winked again in the reflected glare of the burning theater. “I thought this was even odder.”

Her breath caught; she put a hand to her lips.

“You know what it is?” he asked.

“Of course. It was—it was Vincent’s.” A tear trickled from her eye. “He must have dropped it, one of the nights he came to me.”

“Very true,” agreed January, holding the toothpick back when she reached to touch it. “But which night?”

Her glance flickered, for one instant, to his face, and there was nothing of grief, nothing of love, in that dark, watchful alertness.

Only a moment. Then she buried her face in her hands.

January took her hands gently and drew them away from her face. “The first time he visited you,” he went on, “—the night Belaggio was attacked—he wore mauve, his usual complete ensemble with amethysts on his watch-fob and glove-buttons and toothpick. And the night of the Truloves’ ball he wore green. I think the only time he wore a suit of pale yellow—the shade that would go with this topaz—was the night he died. We can check with his valet, of course, and the men in the morgue. That was the night you—and Silvio and Bruno and I—were all lured together out to Bayou des Familles.”

“Alas, that I was not there! Daily I have wondered if my foolishness in going out to the countryside . . .” She glanced around her, but Shaw and Cavallo were still arguing in the whirlwind of firelight and shadow. Most of the few spectators in the yard were clustered near the gate.

“I couldn’t understand,” said January, “why nothing happened to us at La Cornouiller once we were imprisoned. Only when I realized who you had to be did I see that the point of the entire excursion was for us to be imprisoned together. For me to be the witness that your friends Cavallo and Ponte weren’t in New Orleans the night Vincent Marsan died. And that you weren’t there, either.”

“I wasn’t!” protested the girl. “This is madness, Signor! I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Her lips trembled; tears welled again in her soft eyes, and she tried once more to bring up her hands to hide her face. “Who do I have to be? These—these men, these slave-stealers . . .”

“I think if we show you to the deck-hand on the Algiers ferry,” said January gently, “—not dressed in organdy with your hair up, I mean, but in a calico frock and a tignon—he’d recognize the ‘li’l nigger gal’ who took the ferry into town at seven or eight o’clock Thursday evening. Almost certainly he’d recognize the one who left town as soon as it was light enough for her to travel safely the next morning. And we probably won’t have any trouble at all finding the stable in Algiers where you put up M’sieu Desdunes’s white-stockinged bay gelding for the night.”

D’Isola sat silent, looking at him as he turned the toothpick in his big fingers, catching the firelight in the jewel at its head.

“You waited a long time for him, didn’t you?” he asked softly. “And I understand. Killing your brother—a man whose name wasn’t even mentioned by the newspaper, a cab-driver even more insignificant to the white jury and the white murderer than the plaçée over whom such fuss was made—did more than rob you of the only person who cared for you. You were twelve. There’s few ways a twelve-year-old girl can make her living once the only person who cares for her is gone.”

She said nothing, but the reflections of the flames that filled those huge, dark eyes swam again with tears. These, he guessed, were real.

“You sang,” said January gently. “Beautifully, according to old M’sieu Faon at the stable, when I went back and asked him. I’m not sure how you managed to reach Naples or who it was who taught you. . . .” She jerked her head aside, but not before he saw the self-loathing in her face, and he remembered Cavallo’s words,
She obtained her
training in whatever fashion she could. . . .
“It’s very easy to pass an Italian as an octoroon, and vice versa, if they don’t have the African features. Once you met Belaggio, it was easy. If the Gower boys hadn’t made a mistake and attacked the wrong man—and in doing so threw suspicion on your friends—everything would have gone very simply.”

He thought she flinched at mention of the Gower boys, but still she said nothing. Only gazed stonily into the leaping shadows of the yard, tears running down her face.

Seeing what? The face of her brother Aucassin Couvent?

The greedy flame in the eyes of Vincent Marsan, just before he died, like Othello, upon a kiss?

“It had nothing to do with me!” Belaggio wailed. “A babe unborn is not more innocent!
Bene,
I had a few harmless dealings with Signor Marsan, but I have no idea why these men would say that
I
took money from the Austrians or anyone else. . . .”

“I don’t think anyone would have suspected you,” January went on, “or thought to connect you with Aucassin Couvent, dead ten years and buried in some nameless grave. Why should they? You’d been in town only a day or two. You had no connection with M’sieu Knight’s skulduggeries, or Incantobelli’s schemes of revenge. Putting the blood in the drawer was very good, by the way; a way to attack yourself without coming to any real harm. Unlike the bruises you later put on your own wrists, or the razor-cuts on your fingers. Certainly no connection with Sidonie Lalage.”

D’Isola—the Isolated One, the name meant in Italian, January remembered: the One who is Alone—turned her head back sharply. Had it not been for the two long tear-streaks in the grimed paint on her face, he would never have thought she had wept at Aucassin Couvent’s name.

In a very clear, cold voice she said, “Signor, I have no idea what you are talking about. You warned me of Signor Marsan once. Since your sister is a courtesan, I assume she knew of what she spoke, though he was never anything but kind and gentle to me.” She drew her hands away from his, but her glance flickered to Shaw, standing a little distance away in the firelight. January saw desperation in her eyes.

“Who these other people are of whom you speak, and why you would imagine that I would have wished to harm a hair of my beautiful Vincent’s head, I cannot think. But if you take this ridiculous tale to anyone, I will be forced to . . .”

“Besides,” said a girl’s voice in halting Italian, and a girl’s slim form stepped from the darkness, “you were asleep in the jail-house by the bayou that night. I took you out a blanket, and something to eat, remember? Why did you leave like you did, before it got light?”