Mozart’s Blood (32 page)

“We'll wait,” Ugo said at length. He stood beside the window, watching raindrops slide down the glass. And then, with a laugh, “Maybe his ship will sink.”

Vivian poured herself a glass of water and came to stand beside him, looking down at the Yarra. It churned energetically between its banks, enlivened by the rainstorm. “A little harsh for all those passengers, don't you think?”

“Darling,” Ugo said, “conscience at this late date?”

“I don't think we can put our hopes on a sunken ship, Ugo.”

“No. And besides, why waste all that nice
sangue
on the fishes?”

“Ugo.” She shook her head. “Not something to joke about.”

“Just trying to make you smile,” he said.

“How long do you want to wait?”

“The voyage should take a week. That will give us time to pack a few things, choose a place to go. Sell the car.”

“Sell it? Why don't we drive it away?”

“Carissima,”
Ugo said in a dry tone. He sighed and turned his back on the view to lean against the window frame. “License plates and so forth. Really, we can't take anything but our clothes and whatever cash we can round up.”

“Oh, Ugo. All this lovely furniture—and the car? All of it?” She gestured at the grand piano they had recently acquired. Her
Così
score was open on the scrolled music stand.

“Yes. All. We'll just have to walk away.” And at her expression of despair, he put his fingers under her chin. “I've done it before,” he said. “And so have you.”

“Only twice. Teresa went into retirement in respectable fashion. Hélène gave a proper announcement to the papers that she was going into a nursing home. This—this will have everyone talking!” She leaned forward to watch the water swirl below the veranda. The idea of starting over again, when her new career had just begun, made her feel unbearably weary. “Where will we go, Ugo? I can't go back to San Francisco.”

“No. I think you're in for a long holiday.”

Vivian straightened and walked to the piano. With reluctant fingers, she closed the score and laid it aside. “I don't like holidays. I like working.”

Ugo said, “You'll have to carry on with rehearsals this week, just as if nothing's changed.”

“I know.”

“I'll slip in the night before we leave and lift those photographs.”

“Take them all, so it's not obvious,” she said.

“Of course.” He walked to the carved armoire they used as a coat closet, taking out his overcoat and hat, a nice fedora he had bought in Sydney. He lifted his umbrella from the stand beside the door.

“Where are you going?” Vivian asked.

He put on the fedora, checking its tilt in the armoire's mirrored door. All softness had disappeared from his face when he turned to her. His eyes glinted darkly beneath the brim of the fedora. “Stocking up,” he said briefly.

“Oh.” She went back to the window, drawn to the constant movement of the water. She heard the door click shut behind him. She sighed, tracing the pattern of raindrops on the glass with an idle finger.

She had not used the tooth since before the earthquake. Ugo had set her free. She knew nothing of his network of suppliers. Occasionally she roused herself to ask, but he always refused to tell her. And it had been such a relief, after the long years of Teresa's life, and then Hélène's struggles, to surrender. To not have to go out into the streets and alleys—to be cared for instead, protected, even indulged—it was a gift she had never expected and could not have anticipated. Not since leaving Limone sul Garda, so many years before, had she experienced such tranquillity.

In the early days after the earthquake, she had asked Ugo why he should do this for her, what his gain could be.

He had smiled. “Even such as I can be lonely,” he said. “And then—there is the music.”

And now that she was in danger of being exposed, he turned his astounding abilities to the problem without complaint and without hesitation. Vivian pressed her hand against the window, feeling the condensation build beneath her palm. Not since Vincenzo had befriended her, a seventeen-year-old girl alone in Milan, had there been a person she could truly consider a friend. And Ugo, whose nature was as conflicted as hers, was even better than a friend. He was a companion, a brother, closer than she imagined a spouse could be, though he would have laughed to hear her say it. Every time he went out into the city in search of what he needed, she worried until he returned. Every time he administered her infusion, eliminating her own need to hunt in the streets, her gratitude was intense.

Teresa, and certainly Hélène, would have taken this setback with resignation. But when she became Vivian, she became someone different. She was more vulnerable, less resilient. She had grown soft. Her disappointment over the loss of Vivian's persona grieved her out of all proportion.

She turned from the window with a little exclamation of disgust at her own weakness and started for the bedroom to begin to pack her things. Ugo would think of someplace for them to go, and he would no doubt have contacts there as well. There was nothing for it, and no other choice. They would simply have to begin at the beginning.

 

The day before the replacement conductor for
Così fan tutte
arrived in Melbourne, the soprano Vivian Anderson vanished from the city. Her assistant, well known to her colleagues, disappeared with her. Police found all of their belongings in the large apartment they shared on the banks of the Yarra River. Their two-year-old LaSalle automobile was still parked behind the building. The police found no clues at all as to their whereabouts. The newspapers proclaimed the production of
Così fan tutte
to be cursed, losing first its conductor and then one of its stars. In a mysterious coincidence, a set of photographs of the entire cast of the opera had been stolen from a display in the theater lobby. The purpose of this theft no one could imagine.

For several days reporters hung about the theater and Vivian Anderson's apartment. They talked to everyone who had known the two missing persons. The maid only came in during the day. The assistant had paid cash for the LaSalle. The apartment owner cleaned it out, finding no papers, no address book, nothing to link the singer to relatives or business associates. No one had heard anything, no one suspected anything. The most popular theory was that, somehow, both had been drowned in the Yarra, their bodies washed out to sea. For a week, the papers talked of nothing else.

But the war was going badly, and Australian forces were being deployed. The story of the singer who disappeared was submerged by accounts of battles and munitions. There were rumors of a Japanese invasion, and talk of the Americans coming into the war. Soon another soprano was found to sing Fiordiligi, and the story of Vivian Anderson was forgotten.

But Vivian and Ugo knew that her colleagues at Her Majesty's Theatre would not forget.

Rôles were too hard to win for singers to simply walk away from them. She would not be able to show her face in Australia—or perhaps in any opera house anywhere—for a very long time.

Domenico opened the English
Times,
which he had delivered with his breakfast each morning. He rarely bothered with much beyond the art pages. He had little interest in the current wars, or the state of American politics, or the wrangling of the United Nations. He flipped through to Arts & Entertainment and smoothed the pages beside his plate. He took a sip of coffee and ran his finger down the page, looking for something that would appeal to him.

He found it almost immediately.

The
Times
and several other papers had been following the current La Scala production with some energy, mostly because of the up-and-coming American soprano, Octavia Voss. Her reviews in New York and Paris had been raves, and now, even in Milan, she was being received with gushing enthusiasm. Domenico thought it was all over the top, a sort of hysteria, just because she was young and attractive. He read the articles anyway, though they made him grind his teeth in irritation.

But today's article…now, this was news.

“Italian basso Massimo Luca,” the article ran, “has withdrawn from La Scala's production of
Don Giovanni,
starring American soprano Octavia Voss.”

Must
they work that woman's name into every article? And what was with Luca?

“The young bass could not be reached for comment, but a spokesman for the company said he had gone to a
pronto soccorso
after his last performance, and was hospitalized with exhaustion and possible anemia. His understudy, Pietro Ricci, will—”

Domenico laid the newspaper aside and picked up his coffee cup. Ignoring the plate of
prosciutto
and melon and croissants waiting for him, he found the television remote and clicked it on. He hoped to hear more news of what had happened to Massimo Luca, but he could make no sense out of the Italian newscaster. He flipped channels, looking for the BBC, but there was nothing but a subtitled comedy. He turned it off and went back to his breakfast tray.

This meant something. He knew it in his bones. He just had to figure out what it was.

He would eat and shower. And then he would find out what hospital Luca was in. He wanted to know.

Octavia ordered a taxi the moment she heard the news, although she dreaded the look she must see in Massimo's eyes. She presented herself at the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli at the earliest possible visiting hour. She wore her trench coat slung hastily over jeans and a sweater, an Hermès scarf wound carelessly around her neck and her hair pulled back in a clip.

She was empty-handed, knowing flowers were hypocritical. It was her fault he was there. No gift or gesture could change that. He would have questions. She didn't know, as yet, how she would answer them, but she meant to try.

In the cab, she tormented herself with self-reproach. When she walked in through the main doors of the hospital and asked for his room, she could barely look into the eyes of the receptionist. She rode up in a sterile-looking elevator and walked down corridors marked with terrifying words:
Radiografia
and
Chirurgia
and
Oncologia.
They were words she had never had to confront. She had never been hospitalized in all of her long life.

She found Massimo's room in a quiet corner of the floor. It was dim and quiet inside. The door was half open, and only a curtain blocked the view of the bed. The smells of alcohol and disinfectant fought with the dull smell of floor wax in the corridor.

Octavia paused for a moment in the doorway, listening to the silence. It seemed Massimo was alone, a small blessing. If his family had been there, she would have had to turn and leave without a word.

Quietly, she slipped in through the door and closed it behind her with a small click. There was almost no light in the room now, and she waited for a moment for her eyes to adjust to the shadows. When she could see again, she put a hand on the curtain and gingerly pulled it aside. Its plastic rings rattled softly against their pole as she drew it closed again and turned to the bed.

He lay quietly, his eyes closed, his hair very dark against the bleached white of the thin hospital pillow. An IV tube ran from an elevated bottle into a needle taped to his hand, which lay limp and unmoving on a beige blanket. His chest barely moved. His legs were too long for the bed, and his bare feet stuck out beyond the blanket, his toes propped against the metal footboard. He looked unbearably young, and thin, and ill.

Octavia stepped close to the bed, and bent over him. “Massimo,” she said softly. “Massimo, dear. It's I. It's Octavia.”

Immediately, startlingly, his eyes opened. The caramel color darkened to milk chocolate in the bad light. The whites were bloodshot. He stared at her as if he had never seen her before.

She said, with a dry mouth, “Massimo. Do you know me?”

And in an eerie echo of the words of the now-dead street girl, he said hoarsely, “Octavia. What did you do? What was that?”

She hesitated, touching his hand with her fingers. His smooth skin was so cold it frightened her. The doctors would have infused him immediately, of course. Now it looked as if they were hydrating him. He would recover, but he looked so weak. She meant to tell him everything, as soon as she could, but…would the shock be too much, at this moment? Days would pass before he believed her, and even then, not until the thirst overtook him would he truly understand.

And now he had withdrawn from the production. It was in the news. Zdenka Milosch would know what had happened. La Società would know. Massimo was in danger.

Before these thoughts finished whirling through her mind, while Massimo's eyes were still fixed on hers with that shocked stare, the door to the room opened, its rubber seal hissing on the gray linoleum.

Octavia stiffened, and the back of her neck prickled. It was very soon for Zdenka to have sent someone, but the elders were nothing if not thorough. She turned, putting her back to Massimo, placing herself between him and the door. She would not allow it. She simply would not allow it, even if it meant her own death.

The curtain slid back, slowly. Octavia tensed in readiness.

When he came forward, relief made her knees go weak, and she sagged against Massimo's bed. “Nick! For God's sake, what are you doing here?”

Nick Barrett-Jones stopped where he was, one hand still on the curtain. His eyes narrowed as he recognized her. He held a spray of flowers, the kind available for purchase in hospital gift shops, in his other hand. “Octavia,” he said sourly. “Do you think you're the only one concerned for our young colleague?”

And behind her, Octavia heard Massimo repeat, “What was that? What did you do?”

Nick's eyes blazed with a sudden, avid curiosity. “What did he say?”

Octavia turned quickly to bend over Massimo, to take his free hand, the one not tethered to the bottle of saline solution. She squeezed it, willing him not to speak again, not to let Nick hear that damning question. His eyes on hers lost their focus, and the lids fell, slowly, inexorably, until his eyes were closed. He slept again, his features softening, smoothing, looking unbearably vulnerable.

Octavia, with an aching heart, laid Massimo's hand gently on the blanket and stepped back. She spoke over her shoulder. “He's sleeping, Nick. We'd better let him rest, don't you think?” She turned and reached for the ridiculous bouquet. “Why don't we find some water for these?”

She put her hand under Nick's elbow and steered him toward the door, much as she had steered him around the set when he forgot his blocking. She felt the resistance in his muscles, but her fingers were hard on his arm.

They reached the corridor just in time to see a little knot of people approaching. A nurse was with them, speaking quietly. When she saw Nick and Octavia, she frowned.
“Solo famiglia,”
she said sternly. She pointed to a sign on the door.

“Mi dispiace,”
Octavia murmured. Nick looked resentful, but he didn't argue as she handed his flowers to the nurse, then guided him down the long hallway toward the elevator.

In the lobby they found that other singers had arrived, with Giorgio and Russell. Russell gave a little nervous cry when he saw Octavia, and came to rest his trembling hand in hers. The tip of his nose was scarlet, as if he had been weeping. One of the artists' liaisons was there, bearing a mass of roses and a card already signed by members of both casts. Octavia saw her dinner hostess of several weeks earlier hurry through the lobby, a worried look on her face. The opera people stood about, murmuring together, wondering at how the young bass could have fallen soill. There was talk about pickup rehearsals and understudies.

Octavia learned from someone who had spoken to a doctor that Massimo would be hospitalized for at least three days. The general assumption, it seemed, was that he had been hiding an illness. There were whispers of a curse on the production. Octavia could only hope that three days in a hospital room under constant supervision would keep Massimo safe for the time being. She drew Russell aside and said, “Russell, do you think I'll be needed for the pickup rehearsal? I have business out of town.”

He shook his head. “It will be Marie, mostly.”

“Thank you. I'll be back in two days,” she said. “And I'll be calling to check on Massimo's progress.”

After a word to Giorgio, she slipped out of a side door of the hospital and flagged a taxi. At Il Principe she threw a few clothes in an overnight case, with the minimum of toiletries she needed for a short trip. She let the front desk know she would be away for a couple of days, and they called the limousine to take her to Malpensa. The clerk offered to arrange her air tickets, but Octavia said she would do it at the airport. She didn't want to leave a trail. She didn't intend anyone to know where she was going.

 

Octavia took a window seat in the business-class compartment. Tense and unhappy, she stared out the window of the Czech Airlines flight at the distant earth spinning beneath the wing of the Airbus, and reflected on the strangeness of leaving Malpensa at six in the evening to arrive in Prague ninety minutes later.

Teresa's first trip to Prague, as a young singer traveling from Milan to join the Bondini theater company, had meant nearly two weeks spent in coaches and roadside inns.

For Hélène, it had been a journey of two days. She and Ugo had taken the train from Paris, with lengthy stops in Nancy and Munich. By the time they arrived at Hlavní Nádra
í the station in Prague, Hélène felt as if the cinders from the locomotive had permeated her clothes and saturated her hair.

It was called the Franz Josef Station in 1907, a towering art nouveau complex, still under construction. The noise of the builders and the bustle of travelers grated on Hélène's nerves. She was tired and dirty and anxious. The scents of frying food from the vendors that crowded the station turned her stomach.

No one was on the platform to meet them.

Ugo merely shrugged at that. “When you see what it's like, you'll understand,” he said.

Hélène had little choice but to follow him as he worked his way through the crowd to a set of stairs leading down into a dim tunnel and on to the main hall on the ground level. The atmosphere in the hall was a bit more orderly. A line of hacks waited outside in the street. As Ugo negotiated with one of the drivers, Hélène looked to her left, where she remembered the Horse Gate set into the city walls. She didn't recognize the silhouettes of the buildings that had been erected in her long absence. A huge neo-Renaissance structure dominated the skyline, and she supposed there was nothing left of the Horse Market.

Ugo called her name, and she allowed herself to be handed into a hack, settled with a blanket around her legs. She pulled her traveling hat firmly onto her head.

Ugo asked, “Are you comfortable?”

She nodded but turned her face away, to watch the changed face of the city roll by.

She was not yet certain of Ugo, and not sure she trusted him, though they had traveled in company for more than a year now, since the day of the earthquake.

She had, in fact, tried to leave him in Golden Gate Park, to go back to the Palace Hotel for her things.

The park had become a place of madness. A makeshift hospital had been set up near one of the entrances, with the ill and dying who had been moved from the nearby Mechanics' Pavilion lying on pallets on the grass. Families were collapsed around heaps of their belongings, all they could carry. Already soldiers were organizing lines for food and water. Hélène averted her eyes from those huddled, weeping over their losses.

She made her way out through the Page Street Gate, hurrying down the hill toward Market Street. The streets were full of smoke, and ominous flames shot up before her, obscuring the eastern horizon. She couldn't think what else to do but press on, though she was jostled by running people, her ears assaulted by the clanging of fire bells and the shouts of men struggling to put out fires here and there. As she struggled down Market, the smoke thickened. The road was a mess of jumbled paving stones. To her left she saw that only the framework was left of the dome of City Hall. On her right, the Post Office and the Mint were ablaze. The Emporium and the Flood Building had vanished as if they had never been built. Everywhere people struggled to get away from the business district, their eyes blank with shock, their faces smudged with soot and tears and blood.

It looked to Hélène, as she pressed on, that virtually everything south of Market had toppled, brick walls smashed, wooden buildings turned to splinters. Plaster dust clogged the air, and she pressed her sleeve to her mouth, trying to filter out the worst of it. She turned right on Second, her heart quailing in her breast, expecting to see that the Palace Hotel had suffered the fate of so many other buildings.

A spurt of hope filled her when she saw through the smoke that the flag still flew from the roof of the Palace. Jets of water played around it, the first sign of hope she had found. As she stood below, gazing up at this wonder, a man at her elbow said, “You should get away from here, miss. It's going to burn.”

“But the water!” she said, pointing up at the bright streams arcing through billows of smoke from nearby fires.

As she stood looking up at the elegant façade of the hotel, the jets faltered and died. Moments afterward the fire, which had been growing inside the two-foot-thick walls, exploded through the roof. Hélène stood helplessly in the street, watching the fire blossom and burst through the many floors of the Palace Hotel. The last thing to burn, consumed by flames running up its supporting pole, was the American flag flying above the devastation.

Hélène stood where she was for long minutes, unable to think what to do next. Everything she owned had been in her room at the hotel—her money, her clothes, her scores. The little garnet brooch, Vincenzo dal Prato's gift, was the last remnant of Teresa Saporiti's life, and the only one she had dared to keep.

Hélène wept sooty tears and watched in stunned amazement as the hotel collapsed on itself, shooting clouds of ash into the already-fouled air of the city.

She was hardly aware when Ugo appeared silently beside her, took her arm, and led her gently away. She found herself on Market Street before she regained her composure. When she did, she pulled free of Ugo's grip. “I have to go to the opera house,” she said. “Perhaps they'll pay me, at least for last night.”