The Black Opera (51 page)

“No.”

Clearly, she had expected this question.

“We'd been gone from Venice two years before I fell for a baby. Corrado, I want to talk to you—we
will
talk, when the opera's safely launched—because
there's so much for us to say.” She paused. “It's just over a week; try to bear with him until then?”

It was not the question he wanted to have asked of him. But since it was Nora, he said, “Yes, I swear.”

She stepped back, inclining her head in a polite nod.

The Conte di Argente was visible across the chamber, Conrad realised; talking with the second violin. As Conrad watched, Roberto shot a glance at Leonora.

Leonora walked away, gracious, exchanging words with all of the cast during this resting period.

Not mine, never mine, she went through death and came back and she still chose il Superbo over anyone else.

He saw Nora approach her husband. This time he tried to watch and see, rather than be overcome by jealousy. Leonora smiled up into her husband's face. Roberto touched her hand gently, for such a squarely-built man, and then swirled an errant lock of her hair around his finger.

She swatted mock-angrily at his hand and swept off, talking to the seated members of the cast, until Sandrine held up a mirror so that the pale woman could take out the pins and rearrange her hair.

Conrad waited until the composer was standing alone, between conversations; strain momentarily creasing his face.

“Signore.” It was difficult to expose his sincerity to the other man's possible acid. He nonetheless finished. “I have only just heard. I would like to offer you condolences on the passing of your child.”

Contracting lines showed at the corners of Roberto Capiraso's eyes. The Conte di Argente was taken aback, evidently. He weighed Conrad with a long look.

His narrow glance relaxed.

“Thank you,” Roberto said soberly.

A chord sounded from the piano. Conrad glanced across to see Paolo playing the first phrase of Cortez's aria of love for the Princess Tayanna. Giambattista Velluti had taken Leonora's hand. Now he sang to her with self-assured passion. There were comments from the other singers and musicians gathered around, but not distinguishable over Velluti's warm contralto notes.

“Vulgar exhibitionist!” Roberto Capiraso sighed.

It was an almost cordial sigh. Il Superbo had evidently become used to the castrato's foibles.

Surveying the crowd around the piano, under the oil lamps that barely touched the gloom high in the bottle-shaped roof, Conrad found himself saying, seriously, “The time's coming when we have to tell them.”

The Conte di Argente swung on his heel, bringing him around to face them.
Sandrine's mezzo sounded as she joined her voice with Giambattista, both of them now serenading a laughing Nora.

“That it's not organised criminals they have to fear.” Roberto raised a brow.
“Do
we need to tell them?”

“The essential people, yes—they've noticed the attacks that are feeling out our strength. We owe them.” Conrad met il Conte's gaze. “If any of them are going to crack, and need to be replaced, the sooner we know about it the better.”

Roberto Capiraso nodded. “I… yes. I suppose you're right.”

Conrad thought, momentarily, of Adalrico di Galdi, and the nameless priest in the Duomo. “I imagine that the Prince's Men
themselves
may spread rumours about their presence in Naples—because they'll know that, if we haven't told the company, our people will see that as a betrayal.”

Roberto made a very unaristocratic grimace. “Yes. The cast have new material to adapt to, today and tomorrow; shall we say, tell them in three days' time?”

“Monday,” Conrad compromised. “Make it tomorrow evening.”

“Very well.”

There was a pause.

“I suppose, under different circumstances—” Roberto Capiraso evidently braced himself. “—You are a man for whom I might have developed a slight respect.”

There was no doubt, looking at him, that the man was genuine. The mixture of old pain, embarrassment, anger, and relief at having spoken his mind was too complex for any actor.

Under different circumstances, Conte di Argente, you and I would have been friends.

“‘A slight respect'?” Conrad echoed, giving the other man a chance to hear what he had said, and decide how he intended it to be taken.

Roberto Capiraso perceptibly winced.

Conrad offered his hand. He couldn't help a smile. “I suppose that's the best I'll ever get out of Il Superbo.”

The Conte di Argente choked back a snort.

They shook hands, and went to break up the impromptu duet in favour of actual rehearsals.

Morning came and made it Monday, March 6th: eight days left of the deadline.
Somewhere in the Empyrean
, Conrad thought,
Moon and Sun and Earth are drawing together according to the inexorable Laws of Motion
. Moving towards a
line that will pull with massive strength at the crust of the world.

He put together a picture of Naples above, but now only from men's reports. Tremors of the earth had become a regular occurrence; they sounded as hollow dull thuds in the caverns. Campania had minor quakes so often, without visible result except an occasional rock-fall, that even in the mines people ignored them.

There was talk of extra vents opening on the mountain. Colonel Alvarez reportedly sent some of his men up by donkey, plodding the slow and tortuous rise from the base of the volcano, to the edges of the ash-field bordering the fathomless crater. The air was startlingly cool on the way up, but turned scorching hot near to crevasses that vented out smoke stinking of sulphur.

“Be reasonable, padrone,” Tullio said. “If Vesuvius went boom
every
time there were earthquakes and smoke-vents, people wouldn't have got in the habit of ignoring it, would they?”

Conrad muttered about Pliny.

Much of the libretto of Act IV was composed and scored in record time. Rehearsal in the catacombs took place in three shifts, over eighteen hours a day. Hearing his words sung transformed them.

“But not enough,” Conrad muttered, where they sat at the back of the main rehearsal mine, passing a bottle.

“It's… not a
bad
opera,” Tullio offered. He took the bottle and drank in his turn. “In places it's fucking spectacular. But there's long patches where… none of it's surprising, know what I mean? Patchwork Donizetti pretending to be Bellini, with a bit of Rossini crescendo thrown in.”

Conrad winced. “We have eight days during which we can kick il Superbo's backside and
make
him compose up to his full potential.”

Tullio leaned one elbow on a music stand, and squinted up an upturned empty bottle.

“No one knows how good their black opera is.” He gave the bottle up for empty and lowered it. “Padrone, you know, maybe this doesn't have to be the best thing ever put on at the San Carlo—it just has to be a better opera than
theirs
.”

“I disagree. We have this
one
chance. We have to make it the best that we possibly can.”

Conrad put his head in his hands, raked his fingers across his scalp, and emerged energised but (he suspected) unkempt.

“And even if that's not the case—can we really risk everything on that chance?”

With the end of the self-imposed deadline approaching, during frantic rehearsal, the only violence in the catacombs had come from Captain Alvarez's regiment, and the Naples police officers detailed to assist them in guarding the opera rehearsals.

And Tullio Rossi.

And Luigi Esposito.

It only came to Conrad by report, which caused him to curse himself for working so hard.

“You should have seen it!” Isaura was all Paolo, seemingly oblivious as to why the police chief and the ex-soldier might be fighting. “Luigi put him on the floor without even getting his white gloves dirty! I thought Tullio was a soldier?”

“Now I think about it, he's been out of the army a few years.” Conrad shrugged. “Luigi's the police chief of a rough district, and he came up through the ranks.”

Which apparently Tullio didn't know
.

Or
that Luigi is a devious smart bugger who is not above brass knuckle-dusters.

“We had a short discussion afterwards,” Tullio reported, when Conrad finally persuaded him to speak. “He admits I've got the right to first go, because I met her first. But he reserves the right to flirt.”

“No, really?” Conrad stopped himself snickering.

“I agreed. Because he can't
not
, padrone; it would kill the ponce!”

Conrad burst out laughing.

The ex-soldier wandered off to Estella and Sandrine, to further contaminate the gossip-well at source, so that it wouldn't be known what he and the police chief might have been fighting over.

Conrad caught Roberto's gaze across the rehearsal hall and found himself coming to unspoken agreement with the composer.

They can wait one more day to be warned about the Prince's Men; let them enjoy their freedom from it while they have it…

There were still territorial and administrative differences between the police and the army. Conrad took care to be in the small catacomb he reserved as his study when scuffles occurred—usually late in the evening, after drink.

“You leave me the hard work,” Luigi complained, coming in on Tuesday, the following morning, uninvited; throwing down his hat and gloves on a pile of femurs.

“I leave it to the man who knows what to do!” Conrad cut short a gesture
with his writing hand and still left a blot of ink on the end of Act IV scene 3. “If there's another way into this part of the tunnels, you're the man who knows about it. And your men, too. Not that I intend to hint anything about illegal gambling operations.”

“Good.” Luigi raked his hand through his hair, looking rather less spruce when he had done. “What is it about rifles? You were in the army. Why do they immediately turn any man who carries them into a dumb brute?”

“Don't ask me. I was Horse, not Foot. Ask Captain Tullio. If you dare!” Conrad grinned at him. He wiped his pen clean on a cloth. “Any more snoopers?”

“We've managed to successfully keep all intruders out of this area. There are still one or two men coming in to have a look at what's going on—some are local criminal gangs, and a few are obviously hired men.”

“Hired by the Prince's Men?”

Luigi Esposito elegantly shrugged. “One would imagine so. Either way, they haven't got past the picket line, never mind the inner guards. I may think Fabrizio Alvarez wears the silliest hat this side of Catania, but he does know his job.”

A yawning Tullio wandered in, evidently picking up the last words. In the spirit of his new truce with Luigi, he remarked, “You never saw padrone here in his cavalry helmet, did you? Now
that
was silly.”

Conrad essayed plaintiveness. “I
am
sitting here…”