The Black Opera (11 page)

“I forwarded the request, sire. An answer will arrive when it can.” His bow to the Majesty of the Two Sicilies could be charitably describable as perfunctory. All his attention focused on Conrad himself.

Conrad noted that the man had police insignia on his uniform. A
Commendatore. That will make him Luigi's boss; the overall Chief of Police for Naples.

“Sire, I heard that you were directly interrogating the criminal responsible for burning down the Teatro Nuovo.”

The King gave Mantenucci a look of long acquaintance, and considerable amusement. “And so you hurried here, hoping to see that the King isn't messing the case up through direct intervention?”

“Wouldn't dream of saying that, sire… If I were to
remind
Your Majesty that police investigations are my purview, rather than Your Majesty's…”

The King's look was far more friendly than the man's words seemed to justify. “Really, Enrico, I have absolutely
no
desire to take on the Chief of Police's job along with my own. Any more than you would choose to be King.”

“Too right I wouldn't.” Mantenucci snorted.

They spoke to each other, Conrad thought, like a General and his most trusted officers, with the humour of shared experiences, good and bad, and with the air of men who will fight.

Conrad remembered etiquette sufficiently that he waited until after the Major seated himself to sit down. Enrico Mantenucci served himself coffee, that smelled quite wonderful, and drew up a chair to the end of the map-chest. A glance at Ferdinand assured Conrad the King had begun to drink from his own bone china cup.

Conrad brought his cup to his mouth and drank, just as the Major turned and raked him with an assessing glance.

“So this is our atheist pyromaniac, is it?”

Conrad managed, superbly, not to sneeze his coffee out of his nose.

He rose from his seat again and bowed. The police chief did the same.

Ferdinand waved them both to sit down.

“I've asked you here, Enrico, to introduce Signore Conrad to what we know of the Prince's Men.” He turned with perceptible authority to Conrad. “I have few men who are more knowledgeable.”

“Know your enemy!” Mantenucci helped himself to more coffee. His tone of voice turned gruffly apologetic. “You won't find a police officer in Naples who thinks highly of humanity in general; we see too much of men at their worst. So I dare say I hold these scum in too much contempt. You must judge for yourself, Signore Scalese.”

Mantenucci visibly collected his thoughts.

“I will say one thing. The beliefs of the Prince's Men are dangerously strong. And, as with any madmen, if their recruits spend a lot of time around them, they come to believe the same things by a kind of contagion. We've had a few of their runners and messengers for interrogation, and it's always the same. They're serving God, and they won't let any of us sinners stand in their way.”

Conrad startled. “They're a religious association? His Majesty described them as a radical political conspiracy.”

Ferdinand demurred. “Not
just
that. I've said I think them like the Freemasons.” Mantenucci ejected air from his nostrils sharply. “Oh aye! Or the Rosicrucians, Alchemists, Zoroasters, Hospitallers, Knights of St Gaius, and the rest.
I
say they're as much a religious order as the Dominicans or the Franciscans. They just happen to be utter heretics.”

Ferdinand, catching Conrad's eye, murmured, “Good Catholic,” with a tilt of his head towards Mantenucci that appeared more amused than anything else.

The Commendatore of Napoli's police gave his King the look of a man both long-suffering and sharing an old joke.
“If
I might continue, sire… These Prince's Men. Religious, yes, because of their belief in God. But Devil-worshippers, too, because for them the universe is arsey-versey—”

“Devil
-worshippers?” Surprised into interrupting, Conrad put his tiny cup loudly down onto its saucer. “Are you certain? Not just worship of the wrong deity?”

Mantenucci's expression warmed, briefly, as if to someone scoring a hit in fencing. “I see you're not to be frightened by a few heresies.”

Conrad found his own smile equally ironic. “I am a heresy, I'm told, signore.”

The police Commendatore set his elbow on the map desk, and subjected Conrad to a closer scrutiny than was comfortable. Finally he gave an amiable nod. “All right, signore. Let's put yourself in their position. For the sake of argument, suppose that
we're
Prince's Men—”

The King raised a quizzical eyebrow.

“Not you, sire,” Mantenucci qualified. “You're too good a son of the Church. Now Signore Scalese—”

“Conrad.”

“—Conrad, here,” the police chief echoed, good-humouredly, “is a damned atheist, and I'm equally damned for what I see every day among the scum of Naples. So let's say that he and I are Prince's Men. Here's our first question. Who made the world?”

“No one?” Conrad offered, having no idea of his theoretical role. “It began by natural processes, developing from—Leucippus's atoms? Heraclitus's fire?”

Ferdinand interrupted, enthused. “Ah! The old pagan philosophers before Plato! Pythagoras, Anaximander; with their perennial search for first causes… You're one of the
physiologoi
, Conrad!”

It was impossible not to respond to the other man's intellectual delight. Conrad smiled.
“'Physiologoi,'
‘Natural Philosopher'—it's only another word for
scientist
, sir.”

Enrico Mantenucci glowered briefly at his sovereign, cutting the interruption short, and turned back to Conrad. “We're supposed to be Prince's Men, the two of us, and
their
answer is, God made the world—”

“Of course,” Conrad remarked.

“But.”
The Commendatore ticked off a point on an upraised forefinger. “It's not the God of good Catholics like his Majesty here. It's the Watchmaker God of English Signore Newton and the French Deists. God made the world, gave it universal laws to tick and function—and then ran off somewhere, never to be seen again. So, if we're Prince's Men, who's
now
in charge of the world?”

Conrad allowed himself a hopeful note. “No one?”

“You'd think so, wouldn't you? But, no—” Mantenucci checked off a second point on his fingers. “Devil-worshippers, remember? As Prince's Men, we hold that the Creator God's nature was
evil
. He set up a universe in which everything that lives suffers pain. The penalty for original sin is visited on every head, even babies too young to do more than breathe and blink.”

Conrad caught a glimpse of pain in Mantenucci's expression, and wondered what accounted for it.

Mantenucci took a breath and regained enthusiasm. “Fortunately, in the moments after Creation, before He departed, He left a deputy in charge—known
as Satan, or the Devil. But this isn't a good Catholic Satan, but what we Prince's Men call ‘the Prince of this World.'”

Ferdinand, as if he continued a long argument, interjected, “Which is the
Manichaean
heresy of the Albigenses!”

“Yes, sire, but I doubt they've been in Naples
that
long.” Mantenucci prodded the map-chest with an arresting finger. “The Prince of this World, hence the name of his followers—”

“You don't consider,” Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily interrupted, his tone melancholy, “that we're creatures of the Fall, and need pain to teach us morality? Or, at best, that pain's an inescapable accompaniment to free will?”

Mantenucci shook his head. “As a Prince's Man, I wouldn't consider it. Pain is evil.”

“I could have some sympathy with that view,” Conrad said aloud.

He found the police chief aiming the next question at him:

“Signore Conrad, who's responsible for good?”

It felt as if he discussed a libretto with a composer, rather than the censor; one of those moments when all the possibilities of a story present themselves for due consideration.

Conrad mused. “I'm a Prince's Man… So. Let me turn it around. I don't attribute responsibility for evil to the ‘Prince of this World.' He didn't create it. Has he even been given enough power to prevent it? Evil must be inherent in the Creator-God, since it was one of His first principles. So good, which opposes evil, has to come from… Satan? The Prince of this World?”

Mantenucci nodded like a professor whose pupil advances.

“Exactly! The God that created us all quickly abandoned us all. The Devil, the ‘Prince of this World,' is the only hope we have for good in the world; hence his followers, the Prince's Men—”

He interrupted himself to add, “I know you have different ideas, Majesty, but I see no possible origin of the name except the Gospel of the Sainted Apostle John!”

Ferdinand gave a wry smile. “Having read the good Signore Niccolò di Bernardo dei
Machiavelli
, and his treatise of government, I merely wonder if
The Prince
is not a model for how they plan to govern all Italy.
That
would make them ‘Prince's Men.'”

Mantenucci snorted, under his breath, and pushed fingers through hair too short to ruffle. It shone like iron in the morning light through the gauze curtains.

We must make an odd picture. Opera writer, police chief, and King!

“We'll be lucky if they're only after Italy, Majesty.” The Commendatore drained his Turkish coffee at a gulp. “Now. I've been able to piece together their
talk of the Devil. They speak in the way the old Hebrews and Muslims do—he's an Adversary, a Tester, to make sure that men are kept as moral as God intends 'em. That's what the ‘Prince of this World' was to do
originally
: test men to see they'd be strong, like metal in the forging. But the God who created us left, and the world was left in the Tester's hands.”

Conrad made to speak.

Mantenucci held up an arresting finger. “As a Prince's Man—I have to say the Tester's hands are tied. The Adversary can't change the way the universe is set up: God laid down universal laws, as strong as Time and as steady as bedrock. The Prince of this World might be able to mark every sparrow which falls, but he can't
do
a damn thing about it.”

Under the man's iron-dark brows, a light sparked.

“That's where the Prince's Men come in. They see themselves as acting
for
him. Man has free will.”

“As if an all-
knowing
God could create true free will—!” Conrad stopped himself, seeing it was plainly not the time for that discussion.

Enrico Mantenucci waved it off sternly. “Man's free will is the one exception to those universal laws. What
are
miracles, but mankind's free will requesting God to make an exception to the laws of Creation?”

“Commendatore, you do realise that's not a rhetorical question?”

“Gentlemen!”

Mantenucci inclined his head to the King. “As Prince's Men, we see there are tiny chinks in the universal Law.
However
they come there. Miracles. So. What do we choose to do?”

Conrad closed his eyes against the bright stimulus of the wall maps, and rested his chin on his joined hands. “As a Prince's Man, I choose… to exploit that in some way?”

He opened his eyes to find the grizzled police chief looking almost mischievous.

Mantenucci said, “Absolutely. Miracles are made by the Prince of this World, to help Mankind. But
also
suppose…”

Conrad allowed himself to follow the internal logic of Mantenucci's proposition. “—Suppose that it can go both ways. That mankind can help the Prince of this World…?”

It spread itself out instantly in his mind, like a logic problem a tutor might present, or any difficulty in solving how an opera might finish.

“—Help the Prince. By doing…something that he can't do for himself. By bringing about a miracle?—An opera miracle?”

Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily and Enrico Mantenucci exchanged glances, expressions between smug and rueful.

“I have every confidence in my atheist pyromaniac,” Ferdinand said.

Mantenucci barked a laugh. “O, very well, sir. Grant you that one.”

He leaned an elbow on the map desk and turned back to Conrad. Seen with the morning light full on him, Conrad thought him closer to fifty-five than forty-five, but he was full of a contained fierce energy.

“That's it
exactly
.” Mantenucci visibly dropped his stance as Devil's advocate. “According to everything our spies have gathered, the Prince's Men need to request—or create—a miracle, to bring about a change that the ‘Prince of this World' can't.”

Conrad thumbed his right eye-socket. The merest spectre of pain haunted him as he sifted the flood of information. “If there's a real danger, won't it come from this conspiracy and how much political and religious unrest they might stir up?”