The Black Opera (31 page)

The jailers who took him from the police—hustling him with far less politeness down the corridors of the forbidding large building—opened a door and pushed him through.

Tullio turned away from a bare window and took three quick strides across the room. Conrad found himself seized and briefly if intensely hugged.

“Sorry, padrone.” Tullio swept his arm around as he stepped back, indicating the bare floorboards and Spartan room. “Even with Captain Luigi's help, this was the best we could do.”

Three strides had been enough to cross from window to door, and it was no wider from the wall against which a palette-bed lay, to the tiny fireplace opposite—currently empty of fire. A bag which Tullio had evidently packed stood by the bed.

“You and Luigi want your heads knocked together! Do you have any savings left?”

Tullio scratched at his shaved head. With the air of a man finding something useful to get him out of a confrontation, he pulled six wax candles out of one of his pockets, and a candle-holder out of the other, and put them down on the room's sole plain wooden table. “Isaura's bringing some coal for the fireplace, and ink and paper. I guess the faster you write, the faster you get out of this place.”

Conrad lifted his face to the light coming in through the uncurtained windows.
He's not going to answer questions about money.

“And don't you worry about that
Il Superbo,”
Tullio added with a growl, as he set kindling ready for the coal. “There isn't a good bone in that man's body; he wouldn't know natural human feeling if it ran over him in a horse and cart!”

Conrad pulled out the elderly high-backed wooden chair, and all but fell into it. The tension of the past hour instantly dispelled, leaving him feeling like cooked spaghetti. He gripped Tullio's arm and released it.

“I want you or Paolo to keep watch on
that place
, now.” Conrad saw Tullio mouth “Palace,” and nodded.
“Safely
. Without being noticed. I need to get word to our friend as soon as he returns.”

The day passed, hours unmarked by any clock. Paolo brought him a carpet-bag of belongings and vanished again.

Conrad drew the wooden stool up to the table, and began paring down a quill. His hands cut expertly, all the while his thoughts scurried around like a disturbed colony of mice.

“There's nothing we can do. Yet.” He put the quill down and picked up another gull's feather, aware of Tullio's hovering worried form. Conrad didn't look up from trimming. “Can I rely on you to bring food in? What they serve here would poison a camel.”

Tullio grunted and folded his arms. “You want me to check for our friend every day. What about—shall I keep an eye on our composer?”

The jailers in any prison are notorious for listening at spy-holes, in case they should overhear anything to blackmail more money out of their prisoners.

“The composer—” Conrad pronounced that without spoken insult, but in the tones Tullio usually used while cleaning horse-muck off his shoes. “—will be kind enough to send me his musical score, as he completes the scenes. You should ask every day if he has anything for me, when you take what I've written to him.”

“Sure.” Tullio looked about himself. “Hang on, padrone, there's one more thing I can think of that you need. Let me go put the fear of God into 'em—”

“The fear of Sergeant Rossi is likely to be more effective!”

Tullio Rossi left with a grin. It was half an hour later before the ex-soldier returned. Conrad startled at the opening of the door, having become lost in his thoughts and the mutable light.

“Tullio?”

The man swung one of the objects he carried—another wooden chair, Conrad realised. Tullio plonked it down on the far side of the table, and put down the bucket he held in his other hand, which turned out to be a quarter full of coal.

“They agreed you don't have to be in isolation. You can have a fire.” Tullio sat and dug in his pockets, and brought out a greasy pack of cards. “And I'll play you at Vingt-et-Un. If Isaura manages to find a cheap enough wine, you can at least be drunk for your first night here. After that, I suppose you will have to work.”

Conrad found he couldn't speak for all of a minute.

“Not Twenty-One,” he finally managed. “If I ever had any idea I could follow my father as a gambler, you cured me of it! We'll play Gin, since at least I can remember what's in the discards.”

He was indeed drunk for his first night, although the wine Isaura found was sour and of a very dubious colour.

Tullio let himself in and out with a fine disregard for the building's status as a prison, until Conrad had to ban him for the morning hours, while he sat at the table—not lighting a candle until he had to—and found to his chagrin that he
could perhaps work better isolated.

Although most of the friends who would have disturbed me socially left town after
Il Terrore
, except for Spinelli and Sandrine. But…

He left unthought the realisation that he missed working in such close concert with an opera's composer. Missed the mutual inspiration that words had begun to take from the music, as well as the other way around.

And he pushed out of his mind the knowledge that, arrogant son of a bitch as he might be, Roberto Capiraso was an imaginative man, and, like most composers, could likely contribute as much to the shape of the words and story as Conrad's incessant questioning would to the shape of the score.

Seven days elapsed. The same answer came from the palace every day.

His window looked out on a nearby brick wall. It was not an inspiring view, but the terracotta, ochres, and sanguines of the brickwork—reduced to evening monochromes, or brilliant in the dawn—were sufficient to take a man's mind off his isolation and imprisonment, at least for a short time, and allow imagination free rein. Conrad lost himself in the first and second Acts, only pausing to eat, and demand technical answers of Paolo-Isaura and Tullio which they were ill-suited to give.

“Don't ask me where you should end the scene!” Tullio finally shrugged. “I just watch operas, padrone; I don't know how they work!”

Conrad broke off his interrogation. “Sorry. At least in here I'm working faster because I'm so deeply involved.”

And I do not—do
not
—wish I was working with Roberto Capiraso
.

Conrad became used to seeing Tullio half a dozen times in afternoons and evenings—bringing in wine, olives, pizza, and whatever other staples the ex-sergeant could forage, along with all the city and theatre gossip he could remember. It was useless to protest his gratitude that Tullio would do this. The big man merely shot him a look that reduced him to the apparent status of a stumbling recruit, and waved away any thanks.

Along with Tullio, two times out of five, Isaura would turn up in one of Sandrine Furino's second-best gowns, with a shawl over her head, and relate how she was chatting with the prison laundresses with a view to arranging an escape.

“Do you think you may have read too many Gothic romances?” Conrad speculated.

Isaura's amused sneer was practised, and modelled on Tullio's own.

Paolo-Isaura and Tullio brought welcome company, both of them. No matter
how sunny and well-lit the cell might be, and how many hours could be lost in the construction of a script for
L'Altezza azteca, ossia Il Serpente Pennuto
, the solitude sapped his energy and his courage.

And I really have no right to laugh at Paolo for reading Gothic novels, Conrad mused, chewing on the end of a dip-pen one morning. It's ironic—every time I speculate about Leonora and the Conte di Argente, I can't help imagining that he abducted her, or blackmailed her into marrying him, or some such Gothic device.

The prison, being a debtor's prison, was nearly as busy with visitors as with prisoners. Conrad grew used to seeing masked women visiting those who might be lovers or brothers; and small children gazing with wide eyes at the place Papa found himself in.

To think of all the times I swore I'd never follow my father, Conrad considered wryly. And at least he managed to stay out of jail…

Towards the middle of that week, Conrad managed to interview two or three borderline applicants for the minor roles, which Spinelli forwarded on the grounds that he was too taken with their charms to judge their voices.

Which I doubt. He just wants me to have contact with the outside world
.

Paolo visited his cell again, to report how the opera continued, and brought the news of having found a tenor.

“Enrichette Méric-Lalande—you know, the French soprano who sings here a lot?
She's
refused us—rudely, actually—but she wrote to say she has a protégé, one Lorenzo Bonfigli, who's a tenor, and he turned up yesterday with her letter of introduction—”

“What kind of tenor? Graceful? Lyric?”

“More spinto than lyric, apparently. He's done a few small heroic roles—and he
can
do Gilbert Duprez's chest-voice high C.” She grinned. “Four times out of five, anyway.”

Conrad reflected on the advantages of a male chest-voice C above middle C, in the same cast as Velluti's soaring castrato.

“Better be five times out of five, or he suffers! Hire him. We need a High Priest of the Sun. That could work as a lyric-dramatic tenor. And I'm murdering him at the end of Act One,” Conrad added, with considerable
schadenfreude
. “He could double as Cortez's Captain in Act Two…”

Isaura cheered up, and continued for some minutes on the initial stages of rehearsal with the material they had.

“Less
than four weeks, now,” she concluded, her initial enthusiasm beginning to sound harried.

Conrad smiled, and ruffled her hair.

“Now
you understand opera. ‘Work faster'!”

His private well-lit cell, away from the crowded and unfumigated main prison hall, was something Conrad would have called a godsend if not aware that he owed it to his friends.

There were also long hours of an absolute solitude. Especially at night.

And since I look to be in here until the King's return…

I'll do as much as I can.

He interviewed Estella Belucci, when she arrived from Palermo one morning, and proved to look very little like a rebel. She turned out to be a surprisingly subdued blonde woman in a fashionable bonnet, who jolted every time someone in the main part of the prison shouted or screamed.