Falling in Love (28 page)

They found his office, not without difficulty, and were met at the door by a harried-looking young man who held two
telefonini
, one pressed to his left ear, the other to his chest: ‘. . . many times do I have to tell you? I can’t do anything,’ he said roughly and switched phones. And voices. ‘Of course, of course, we’re doing all we can, Signore, and we’re confident the general manager will have an answer by the end of the second act.’ He held the phone away from himself for a moment and used it to make the sign of the Cross on his body. That done, he returned to listening for a moment, then said, ‘I’ll see you there,’ and stuffed both phones into the pockets of his jacket.

Looking at the two men in front of him, he said, ‘I live in the circus. I work in the circus. I’m surrounded by ravening beasts. How may I help you?’

‘We’re looking for the stage manager,’ Brunetti said, making no attempt to introduce themselves.

‘Isn’t everyone,
tesoro
?’ the young man asked and walked away.

‘I once told my mother it must be wonderful to be a movie actor,’ a straight-faced Vianello said.

‘And?’

‘And she said she’d burn herself alive if I ever said such a thing again.’

‘Wise woman,’ Brunetti observed. He looked at his watch. Quarter to eight.

‘I suppose the best thing we can do is stand on opposite sides of the stage,’ he told the Inspector. ‘She told me two men from Security will bring her back and forth from her dressing room.’

A woman wearing jeans and a headset walked towards them, and Brunetti asked, ‘Which way’s the stage?’

‘Follow me,’ she answered, not bothering to ask who they were or why they were there. Apparently, once a person crossed the Styx, no one thought to question their right to be in Hell. She walked past them, and they followed her down the corridor, through a door, up a staircase, down another door-lined corridor, and then down a single flight of steps.
‘Avanti,’
she said, pointing ahead, opened a door, and disappeared.

There was less light, but they heard noise from up ahead. They walked one behind the other, Brunetti leading. He thought of using the torch on his phone but instead stopped for a few moments to allow his eyes to adjust to the dimness. He started again, found a thick fire door, opened it and stepped into muffled sounds and bars of light.

It took him a moment to work it out: they had somehow arrived backstage, at the very farthest point from the orchestra pit, off on the right-hand side. Brunetti looked out on the stage and recognized the inside of the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, with scaffolding leading up to a platform built in front of the unfinished portrait of a woman. Below the platform stood a double row of pews, an altar, an enormous crucifix hanging on the wall behind it. The heavy curtain separating this scene from the audience was closed.

Brunetti tried to remember whether Tosca arrived on stage from the left or the right, but failed to recall which. It would be some time before she appeared, at any rate, so they had a chance to place themselves to best advantage, if only he knew what that was. ‘You stay on this side, and I’ll go to the other.’ Vianello was looking around as though he’d been asked to memorize the scene and write a report on it.

‘Will I be able to see you over there?’ the Inspector asked.

Brunetti studied the distance and thought about the opera. All of Act One took place in this setting, so all they had to do was select two points from which they would not lose sight of each other while still having a view of the stage. The next act took place in Scarpia’s office and the third on the roof of Castel Sant’Angelo: steps, the wall against which Cavaradossi would be shot, and the low parapet over which Tosca would leap to her death. Brunetti had no idea where it would be best to stand: probably with the stage manager, if they ever found him, who would have to keep everything in view for the entire performance.

‘We can send messages,’ he said, feeling foolish, especially since he didn’t know if this would be possible in the backstage area. ‘Stay here, and I’ll try to get under the scaffolding.’

‘So we’re looking for a woman?’ Vianello asked.

‘Freddy saw a woman’s hand, and everything we’ve learned says it’s a woman,’ Brunetti answered. Before Vianello could ask, he added, ‘The suspect is French, thirty-four, tall, and has a limp. Nothing else.’

‘Do we know what she wants?’

‘Only she and God know that,’ Brunetti said. He patted Vianello on the arm twice and started across the stage. The instant he stepped forward, two people hissed at him, and another young woman wearing a headset ran at him and pulled him back beside Vianello.

‘Police,’ Brunetti said, giving no further explanation. ‘I have to be on the other side.’ He extricated his arm from her grip.

Without ceremony or question, she took him by the sleeve and led him, walking fast on tennis-shoed feet, to the left. She slipped behind the piece of plywood that formed the altar and back wall of the church and crossed back to the other side of the stage. She deposited him a metre from the back of the scaffolding, told him not to move, and walked away.

Brunetti slipped under the scaffolding, its stairs hiding him from both the audience and the stage. Through a space between the plywood boards, he looked across to where Vianello stood. His friend looked in his direction and raised a hand.

The voices of the audience came through the curtain, dull and low, like the ebb and flow of waves on a beach. A man wearing a microphone and earphones hurried across the stage and set a wicker picnic basket at the bottom of the steps leading to the portrait, turned, ran lightly across the stage, and disappeared through the metal grating of the
cappella
of the Attavanti family.

The audience noise slowly diminished, then stopped, and there came a round of tepid applause, followed by a long pause. Then they came, the five doom-filled notes that began the opera, then the swish of the curtain, followed immediately by the busy music that announced the arrival of the prisoner escaped from Scarpia’s dungeons, and they were on their way.

Brunetti widened his stance in anticipation of being there for the entire act. He leaned back tentatively against a horizontal board that helped support the scaffolding. He looked in Vianello’s direction, then at the singers onstage. Time passed, Brunetti lulled by the familiar music, however muffled the sound might be up here.

Flavia was right about the conductor: things did plod along, even the tenor’s first aria. Every so often, Brunetti turned in a full arc, searching the stage and what he could see of the backstage area for anything or anyone looking as if it didn’t belong there. The woman with the headset suddenly appeared next to Vianello, but neither acknowledged the presence of the other.

He was so occupied with looking around that he missed the musical build-up to Flavia’s entrance and tuned back in only when he heard her calling out for ‘Mario, Mario, Mario.’

The audience greeted her arrival with wild enthusiasm, even before she did much of anything, though Brunetti recalled that there really wasn’t much of anything for her to do in the first act. She stood not more than six or seven metres away; from this distance, he could see the theatricality of her makeup and one or two places on her velvet gown that were rubbed smooth. The closeness, however, also increased the force field that surrounded her as she half spoke, half sang her jealous accusations to her lover. The tenor, who had been rigid and artificial in his first aria, came alive in her presence and sang his brief passages with an intensity that flooded over Brunetti and surely washed out into the audience. He’d questioned people who had killed for love, and in their confessions he had heard this same rapturous uncertainty.

The act proceeded. Flavia left, and in her absence everything slackened. Brunetti wanted to go back to her dressing room but decided not to, both because he did not want to distract her during a performance and because he feared being seen or heard if he tried to move from where he was.

He watched the action, saw how the tenor exaggerated his facial expressions to project them across the footlights. Scarpia seemed badder than bad and thus unconvincing, but as soon as Flavia returned and he could aim his lust at her, the mood tightened; even the music sounded worried.

She prowled the stage in search of her lover, body vibrating with jealousy. Scarpia turned from snake to spider and spun his web until she fell into it and, maddened by suspicion that had turned to certainty, fled the stage. Only the many-peopled majesty of the procession and Te Deum kept things from sliding downhill once she took her energy from the stage. Puccini was a showman, and the scene was powerful, ending with Scarpia’s agonized admission that he had lost his soul.

The act ended, and the applause swept through and under and around the curtain. Brunetti watched the three principals walk to centre stage and, hand in hand, pass through the opening to take their applause.

The applause died down while Brunetti stood and debated whether to try to find her dressing room or not. The security guards, who had watched the first act from the wings, had flanked her as she left the stage. He chose not to add to her stress; instead, he decided to make a circuit of the backstage area in search of Vianello so they could try to find a someone who, like them, did not look as though they belonged there.

Twenty minutes later, he and Vianello stood just inside the fire door, watching the stagehands light and place the candelabra on Scarpia’s table, fluff up the pillows on the sofa where the rape of Tosca was to take place, and set the knife carefully to the right of a bowl of fruit. A man came on to the stage, fussed with the fruit, slid the knife a centimetre to the right, stepped back to admire the new arrangement, and walked offstage.

Scarpia, smiling and talking on his
telefonino
, crossed the stage and took a seat at his desk. He stuffed the phone in the pocket of his brocade jacket and picked up his quill pen. Applause from beyond the curtain signalled the arrival of the conductor. And then the first notes.

Brunetti was struck by how calming this music was: one would never suspect that tragedy was to follow. The lightness disappeared, and soon enough Scarpia began his rapist’s fantasies, words that troubled Brunetti deeply because he had often listened to arrested men say much the same thing. ‘I prefer the smell of violent conquest to sweet consent.’ ‘God created varied pleasures, and I want to taste them all.’

Words quickly turned to action, and Brunetti found himself confronted by the sound and sight of violence. Cavaradossi threatened, Tosca welcomed, but only to be toyed with, her lover taken offstage to be tortured, crying out with pain. Horror piled on horror, until Cavaradossi, bloody and defeated, was dragged in and then as quickly offstage.

The music softened, grew definitely playful, strange prelude to the real horror of sexual blackmail. Brunetti turned his attention back to Tosca just in time to watch her discover the knife lying on the table, the delicate little fruit knife – a tiny blade, but long enough for what she saw instantly she could do with it. Her hand slapped down on the knife, and he almost saw her biceps expand with the force with which she grasped it. Had the weapon made her grow taller? Certainly, she stood straighter, and she had shaken off the air of hypnotic weakness.

Scarpia set down the pen, pushed himself up from his desk, the workman worthy of his hire and coming to collect, and walked towards her, taunting her with the safe conduct in his hand as though it were a sweetie and he were asking her to get into his car with him, please, little girl. As he lured her, she stabbed him in the guts, ripping the knife straight up to his breastbone and out. Brunetti had gasped when he saw her do it last week, and now, closer to her and even more fully convinced of the reality of what she was doing, he gasped again.

Scarpia turned from the audience, and Brunetti saw him squirt blood down his front from a tube in his hand, then turn to Tosca and grab at her. And she, face puffed up with rage, shouted at him that he’d had Tosca’s kiss and that it was a woman who had killed him. ‘Look at me, I am Tosca!’ she screamed into the face of the dying man, and Brunetti felt the horror of her act at the same time as he marvelled that no woman in the audience stood up and cheered her.

She ripped the safe conduct from his dead hand, placed a candle by the other, dropped the crucifix on his chest and, as the music mimicked the dying away of Scarpia, she slipped out of the room to go and save her lover.

The curtain came down; applause flooded in from beyond it. Scarpia got to his knees and then to his feet, brushed himself off and stretched his hands to Flavia, who had been standing in the wings. Cavaradossi, face a bit less bloodied, came and joined hands with them, and the three passed through the opening in the curtain and found themselves engulfed in applause.

‘My God, I had no idea,’ he heard Vianello say from beside him. ‘It’s magic, isn’t it?’

A convert, Brunetti thought, but said, ‘Yes, it is, or it can be. When they’re good, there are few things like it.’

‘And when it’s not?’ Vianello asked, though he sounded as if he could not conceive of that.

‘There are few things like that, either,’ Brunetti said.

The applause died down, and when they looked to the other side of the stage, they saw Flavia flanked by the two security men. Brunetti waved, but she didn’t see him and left the stage with the two guards. Tired of standing for so long, they asked a passing stagehand where the bar was and followed his instructions. They took two wrong turns, but eventually they found it, had a coffee, and listened to the comments that were being passed back and forth. Brunetti heard nothing he thought worth remembering, but Vianello listened attentively, as if there were something to learn from what people said.