The Black Opera (37 page)

The King nodded enthusiastically. “Surely that would have wonderful acoustics for rehearsals!”

In the east's harsh light, Enrico Mantenucci's face showed deep determined lines. “There are a limited and manageable number of exits and entrances. All could be protected by armed men. Whereas the singers can be attacked in places like this—” He waved casually at the blackened beams. “—Under Naples, there would be less danger of that. Any trouble and they could be led out by other routes.”

Conrad found himself nodding.

“Assuming all of us can be trusted.” Ferdinand pulled his coat more tightly around himself in the brisk wind. “But that's always a consideration. Very well, Enrico—can I rely on you to clear out the required spaces?”

“Sir!”

Conrad went to move off in the police chief's wake. The King's hand rested on his shoulder.

“Is there something else? You seem concerned.” Ferdinand's plump, bland expression was surprisingly penetrating. “Have you, for example, spoken to Roberto Capiraso or his wife since you left prison?”

“No, sir. Yes, there's something, but that's not it.”

I feel fear
, Conrad realised.

Because of what my mind has been turning over, while I dealt with hysterical friends and a damaged building…

Everything fits. I just wish it didn't
.

“What is it, Conrad?”

“Sir, I think that someone else knew, beforehand, that the rehearsal hall was going to burn last night.” Speech hurt Conrad's dry throat. “I was decoyed away, like your guards.”

Ferdinand lifted his brows. His voice, if firm, was sympathetic. “By who?”

“My father.”

“Y
our
father?”
Ferdinand exclaimed. “Your father's dead! If he wasn't, you wouldn't have inherited his debts, and I wouldn't have had to twist the arm of the Conte di Galdi!”

“He often appears as a spectre, sir.”

The wind off the sea lifted Conrad's short hair.

“It was done so neatly I didn't notice. Someone knew enough to decoy me in the library with just the books I might want—knew enough to keep me talking, and to delay me until it was too late to be worth going to the rehearsal hall.”

Conrad looked down at his hands. The extremity of his fingers were white, either with cold or dread.

“My father knows me too well. Either he did this deliberately, or he was a dupe who told others about me. I swear, I only talked to Father about the story of the opera. But clearly that was too much.”

Further down the crowded street, Conrad saw Major Mantenucci in conversation with Tullio.

Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily slipped his arm through Conrad's, and Conrad found himself steered back on the way towards the Palazzo Reale. They ended up on one of the quays.

The King stopped and gazed out over the choppy Bay, and the two blues of sea and sky, rubbing both his hands together. “Alfredo Scalese—a true ghost?”

Conrad shrugged. “Difficult to say, sir. He always looks like Father. He knows what Alfredo would say in any situation. Whether it is a remnant of the man I knew, or whether it's just an echo of some sort, I can't say.”

If I decided that, I'd have to decide how I feel about what he says
.

“He was very intent on keeping me in the library all night. I don't know if that was to protect me, or to prevent me stopping the fire, or even both.”

Conrad drew a breath.

“But I've had time to think, now. And I should have seen this before… It's obvious. There shouldn't have
been
anyone in Naples who knew about all of Alfredo's debts.”

The waters of the Gulf of Napoli beat on the rocks at the foot of the wall.

Conrad stared at the repeating waves, rather than look at King Ferdinand's face. “I hadn't spread the news around. I never do. It's my business, and only
mine. And yet, Adalrico Silvestri knew exactly what to demand—and from who—down to every last tiny creditor.”

It was on his lips to explain further, to describe how Alfredo Scalese owed gambling debts in Prussia, rent in Westphalia, money for a South American mining scheme in St Petersburg, and fifty others that only a son should know.

The King's expression showed it was unnecessary. “I should have realised that.”

As for who else knows details—the Pironti family?
Doubtful, since it turns out I
haven't
been communicating with Gianpaolo Pironti all these years… Isaura will know.

I trust
her
implicitly.

Conrad wiped his mouth in a vain attempt to get rid of the taste of smoke, and blurted, “Therefore—I think it must be true—that my father is with the Prince's Men!”

Ferdinand's hand rested briefly, comfortingly, on his arm.

“I talked to him,” Conrad finished miserably. “And I don't, in all honesty, remember
everything
I said. They could have learned anything through me. Sir, I'm sorry.”

“I think few men wouldn't talk to their father, in your place.”

Ferdinand's understanding was almost worse than being shouted at.

“Yes, sir, but I know what he's like! I've always known. He was a loving, wonderfully funny father—who couldn't be relied on to remember the smallest promise, or be persuaded to stop doing anything if he felt like doing it.”

The words came away like scabs being picked off. The only consolation was that they were true.
And I should have said them a long time before this.

“I know my father. If he
has
fallen in with the Prince's Men… He's capable of sabotaging an underground rehearsal, or the San Carlo. Or leading other men—living men—to do it. He won't be stopped if I ask him, or if someone argues—not for logic or threats—he always does exactly what he likes, and opposition only makes him more bull-headed—”

“Corrado—”

“I need to make a request of you, sir.”

Voices echoed from the nearby crowds, but Conrad felt as though he and Ferdinand stood in deep silence.

“I want you to tell me, sir, if there's anything you can do to stop a spy who can pass through any walls, overhear any words, penetrate any locked door.”

Conrad watched the King's face lose colour.

“Then I make a request of you, sire. Will you ask the Cardinal of Naples if he'll exorcise my father?”

The Duomo and Archbishop's Palace had both been built at an earlier age, before the Normans came into Sicily and the mainland, and were based on the foundations of older buildings still. Since the private chapel they entered had survived (among other events) the great medieval earthquake, it had little of the later decorations and alterations of the main church. Squat columns of white stone held up a vaulted roof. Light that managed to slant its way in through Romanesque window-arches turned to champagne. The stone altar breathed antiquity.

It would have been calming, Conrad thought, if not for the gilded statues of saints, their wounds painted in exact colour, which seemed out of place against the grim original walls. He lost himself in gazing at the racks of prayer-candles. The dazzle allowed him to forget for a time what he was doing here.

A sensation of proximity made him look up.

A man in Dominican black and white rested both hands on the back of the pew.

“Signore.” The voice was familiar.

The low light was clear enough to show sleek black hair and burning dark eyes. Canon-Regular Luka Viscardo gazed forward, apparently watching King Ferdinand and the Cardinal, Gabriele Corazza, talk.

Viscardo spoke quietly enough that his sneering tone wouldn't reach the King or Cardinal. “I wonder why, signore, if you're an atheist, you believe the souls of the dead haunt the Earth?”

“Because I
perceive
them, Viscardo.” Conrad matched him sneer for sneer. “Like the Returned Dead, but not corporeal. I doubt they're ‘souls' in your sense. Just because there's something that appears to be the personality of a dead man, that doesn't mean that it is.”

Conrad paused, and dissected emotionlessly:

“If it
is
a survival of something after death—that doesn't necessarily mean there's anything religious about it. It could be a non-supernatural echo of a personality. Or it could simply be that our next stage of life, after we appear to die, is as an incorporeal being. None of that implies a ‘soul'.”

Leather shoes squeaking, Viscardo walked around the end of the pew and sat down beside him, leaning forward as if he comforted a parishioner. “So that's why you're willing to have us kill your father?”

Conrad couldn't hide his reaction. He grunted. The words hurt him like a boot under the ribs.

Is this what I'm doing? Murdering what remains of my father?

Viscardo's tone turned unctuous. “This is a sad day for you, signore. There is
a comfort in having the ghost of a loved one about the place. As if the person is not quite gone.”

Conrad stood up, unsurprised to find the King and Cardinal within earshot now, walking back from the altar. He found one of his hands balled into a fist. He hid it in the folds of his coat, turning a shoulder to Canon-Regular Viscardo.

“His Eminence agrees with me,” Ferdinand said, his face stern and sad. “And grants permission for the exorcism, which he himself will perform.”

Conrad nodded respectfully to the Cardinal, aware of irony.

This is the man who would have interrogated me, being Head of the Holy Office as he is…

“Yes, sir. When?”

For all his magnificent robes, Corazza resembled very remarkably certain comic prints Conrad had seen in England, of red-nosed, explosive-tempered fox-hunters. The Cardinal spoke in a powerful wheezing voice. “Now.”

Conrad choked out,
“Now?”

“If a soul is in danger of damnation, the sooner it's sent on to God the better.” Cardinal Corazza paced on, calling for various churchman, that Conrad guessed would be his most skilled priests.

Conrad sat down hard on the wood of the pew. Under his breath, he muttered, “Now?”

Viscardo's voice sounded as if he smirked. “So that's how an atheist asks us for an exorcism…”

“Whatever it is that you people do, the method works—mostly—as I understand it.” Conrad met Viscardo's black gaze with unblinking defiance. “A shame you don't investigate it scientifically, to find out why!”

Conrad found Ferdinand's hand squeezing his shoulder. The King gestured the red-faced Canon-Regular away, and implacably watched him go.

“Might I tactfully suggest you keep the heresy quieter?”

Conrad gave a wan smile, but couldn't keep it on his face. “Sir, will we—should I—be present for this?”

“His Eminence has been brought to understand that we will. I think there are questions to be asked of Alfredo Scalese.”

The distant choir sang with Gabriele Corazza as he offered the holy sacrifice of Mass; Conrad could not focus his attention even for a Sung Mass, potential cause of miracles.

He couldn't pay attention, either, to the ancient ceremony of exorcism, no matter how good an opportunity it would have been to observe it. He watched the sun-bathed squat pillars of the ancient Norman chapel. They blurred.

The rite of exorcism continued interminably.

“Vade retro Alfred Amsel!”
Cardinal Corazza's deep voice hit a pitch perfect note.
“Vade retro Alfredo Scalese! Vade retro mundus, exitas mundus
—”

Conrad could not even bring himself to quarrel with their execrable Latin. The chapel echoed with the screams of the ghost.

Conrad was conscious of Ferdinand stirring beside him. He managed to nod to the King.

“Signore Ghost,” Ferdinand Bourbon called.

The spectre glided across the ancient flat slabs of tombs, and was brought up with a jolt five yards from the altar. There was no visible boundary there now, but Conrad was willing to bet money it was where the Cardinal had aspersed holy water at the start of the ceremony.