Cry to Heaven (75 page)

It seemed her face was…too large. Impossibly large. Yet those wide-set black eyes were astonishing him. He stared at her hands as she played with the white hair at her temples, such an exquisite forehead, rising without the slightest slope to that expensive French hair. But such large hands for a beautiful woman, large hands for any woman, and those eyes. He had a sudden sense of drifting, of disorientation that he remembered now from the gondola, and it had nothing to do with the water, or did it?

He felt the room moving just as if they were still in the narrow boat.

“I must…go. I must lie down.”

He watched her rise.

She seemed to rise and rise and rise.

“But that isn’t possible…” he murmured.

“What isn’t possible?” she whispered. She stood over him and he breathed her perfume, which wasn’t so much the French scent as it was her freshness, her sweetness, her youth. She was holding something in her hands. It looked like a great black loop of something, of leather, a belt with a buckle.

“That you…that you could be so tall…” he answered. She had raised the loop over his head.

“You’ve only just noticed it?” she asked, smiling. Exquisite!

It was almost as if he could fall in love with her, imagine it, love her, it was as if there were some substance to her, not the predictable mystery and its inevitable vulgar core, but something infinitely more fierce. “But what are you doing?” he asked her. “What’s this…in your hands?”

They didn’t look human, these hands.

She had dropped this loop of leather belt down over him. What an extraordinary thing to do. He stared down and saw it binding his chest and his arms.

“What did you do with it?” he asked her.

And then when he tried to move, he knew.

She had dropped it over the back of the chair as well, and it was so tight he couldn’t move forward, nor lift more than his forearms. This was most strange.

“No,” he said smiling. He could raise his forearms and he brought them up almost spilling the brandy from the flask. Suddenly he jerked forward.

It was impossible. The chair, immense and heavy, did not move.

“No,” he said again smiling coldly at her. “I don’t like this.” And as if correcting a little child, he gently shook his head.

But she had passed in back of him where he couldn’t see her, and as he tried to lift the belt with his right hand, he realized it was too tight.

He grasped it in both hands now, crossing his arms, the brandy fallen over on the table, his fingers wet and slipping on the leather. Something was holding the belt in its place from behind.

She appeared then at his right shoulder.

“You don’t like it?” she asked.

Again, he gave her that cold smile. He would when this inanity had reached its conclusion make her pay for this when he had her stripped and helpless and his hand over her mouth. Nothing too cruel, only a lesson of sorts, and he saw himself slipping his fingers inside that flat band of embroidery and pulling it loose.

“Take this off, my dearest,” he said coldly, in a voice that was low and full of command. “Take it off me now.”

He saw that large hand dangling just before him at her side, the fingers impossibly long and thin and white, even the rings too large: rubies and emeralds, this was one very accomplished woman, rubies and emeralds and those tiny pearls.

And suddenly jerking his right hand to the side he grabbed hold of her wrist and brought her down hard onto his lap.

“I don’t like it,” he said in her ear, “and I shall snap your pretty neck if you don’t reach behind me and release the buckle now.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t do that to me, would you?” she said without a flicker of fear.

An alchemy was working in him. His mind was clearing as he looked at her, her perfect face, and yet his body was still hopelessly drunk. Dull pain was gathering itself in the front of his head. His arms were so tightly bound that with his left hand he could not possibly reach her neck. But he would break her arm in a moment if need be and force her down, and that would be the end of it. He had been too drunk for this. He should never have come.

“Take the belt from around me,” he said. “Now.”

She stared at him without answering and then she seemed to grow very soft. He felt her shifting on his lap, just as he saw that in the very center of her black eyes was the faintest glimmer of dark blue. Her face was closing out the light behind her. She was so near to him he felt her breath. It was fresh, untainted, and there rose in him that lust for her that would have existed no matter had she been plain because she was so very fresh, so very young.

Just flesh for an instant. Her lips touched his lips, and he found himself closing his eyes. His hand loosened on her wrist but she didn’t move it, and the kiss sent its shock down into
him, summoning his passion almost to that point where nothing else was of importance.

But then he stirred, rolling his head on the back of the chair. “Take off the belt,” he said gently. “Come on, I want you! I want you…” he whispered. “You are a foolish woman to provoke me.”

“But I’m not a woman,” she whispered, just before he silenced her with his mouth.

“Hmmmmm…” He made a small frown. Something dissonant, horridly dissonant in her little jest. His pleasure was sluggish, at war with his drunkenness, and he was vaguely aware that she had laid his hands down again on the arms of the chair, and with her palms she was pressing his hands to the arms of the chair. Gentle, playful, her very touch tantalizing him, but strange.

“Not a woman?” There was something unearthly about the texture of her skin, it was so sweet, so soft, and yet not…“Then what are you,” he whispered, his lips forming a smile even in his kissing her, “if you’re not a woman?”

“I’m Tonio,” she breathed into his lips, “your son.”

Tonio
.

He opened his eyes, his body convulsed violently and painfully before he could even reason, a loud noise like a clanging in his head, his hands struggling both to shove her away off him, yet hold her, grab hold of her, and get her off him, away from him, as he felt a hoarse cry rise out of his throat.

She was gone. She was standing before him, towering over him and staring down at him, and in one moment he understood all of it the disguise, what was happening, and he went wild.

His feet slid and kicked at the floor, his arms tearing at the leather strap, his head thrashing from side to side.

“Federico!” he roared. “Federico!” and as he struggled and fought, his roaring continued, without words, his heels trying vainly to dig into the very stones. Suddenly, very suddenly, when he knew the chair had not moved, that he was helpless, that he could do nothing, he went absolutely still.

She was smiling down at him, smiling.

His head lay to one side, his eyes wide glaring at her, and then she was laughing, a low, smoldering laughter, husky and sensual as her voice had been before:

“You want to kiss me again, Father?” she whispered. And that beautiful face, that flawless white face was frozen in the most lovely and serene smile!

He spat at her.

His teeth clenched, his hands out as if he could somehow summon her with his clawing fingers, he spat at her again.

And then he lapsed back, trembling, head to the side once more, and all of it was coming clear to him with a stunning perfection.

The stage, the endless talk of his beauty and his skill at illusion, that he was woman incarnate before the footlights, and those hands, those horrid and dreadful hands, and the skin!

He felt the nausea rolling up from his stomach. He clenched his teeth against it and exerted all his will not to panic, not to thrash about, not to give her the satisfaction of it. But he couldn’t stop the roaring, the moaning, from coming between his teeth.

Her. She! He closed his eyes, shuddering. Sickness overcame him. He swallowed and shivered with it. And when he opened his eyes again it was Tonio, most surely, holding that great French wig of pearls and white hair in his hands.

The smile was gone from his face. His eyes were glassy and wide and amazed.

He pulled off the black bodice as if it were armor. The skirts, untied, dropped to the floor.

And there, in crumpled white shirt and breeches, hair moist and disheveled, stood a giant of a feline man. There was a stiletto tucked in his waist; there were jewels on the handle, and as he stepped out of the discarded taffeta finery, he adjusted that stiletto with one of those long hands.

Carlo swallowed. The taste in his mouth was rank, and the silence shimmered between them now like the vibration of a thin wire.

For a long time, they looked at one another, this cold-eyed demon with the face of an angel and Carlo, who now very slowly gave an ugly, soft laugh of his own.

He passed his tongue over his lips.

Dry, sore, a crack forming down the middle of the lower lip from which he could taste blood.

“My men…” he said.

“…are too far away to hear you.”

“will come…”

“…not for a long, long time.”

And it came back to him dimly, those steps going higher and higher. And he had said to her, “But there’s water running somewhere, I can hear it, the canal has broken through….”

He could smell the canal. And she, the bitch, the monster, the demon, had answered, “It doesn’t matter. There is no one living here….”

No, no one in this house to hear him, this great crumbling old house.

And in this room with the fire blazing, he had gone to those windows for air and with his own eyes had seen not the street with his men waiting and watching, but, some four stories deep, the dark well of an inner court! They were in the heart of it, this building, and she had let him see it step by step!

Oh, it was too perfect, too clever.

Sweat was drenching him. And after this one I sent a pair of crude murderers. The sweat ran down his back and under his arms. He felt his hands moist and slippery though he did nothing with them, save open and close them, open and close them, struggling against the panic again, the urge to struggle when this oak chair would not yield an inch.

And how many times had he instructed Federico to give him a wide berth with women, how many times had he warned him not to rouse him from any beds?

It had been staged beautifully, and it was no opera. And he had said: “He’s a eunuch, they can strangle him with their bare hands.”

He watched Tonio seat himself at the table opposite, his white shirt untied at his throat, the light playing on the bones of his face, every movement suggestive of the giant cat, the panther, an eerie grace.

He felt hatred in him, dangerous hatred, attaching itself to that face, that perfect face, and to every detail that he saw, to all the things he had ever known and suffered to know about Tonio, the singer, Tonio, the witch before the footlights, Tonio, the young and beautiful one, the famous one, the child reared by Andrea to every blessing and indulgence under that roof all those years while in Istanbul he raged and raged, Tonio, who had all of it, Tonio whom he had never escaped, not for one moment, Tonio and Tonio and Tonio, whose name she’d cried
out on her very deathbed, Tonio who had him now, despite the knife and those long weak eunuch limbs, despite the bravos and a life of caution, helpless and captive now.

If he did not let it out in a great roaring cry, this hatred would drive him mad.

But he was thinking, thinking. What his bravos needed was time. Time to realize this house was empty, too dark, time to start prowling about it.

“Why didn’t you kill me?” he demanded straining suddenly against the leather, his hands clutching at the air before him. “Why didn’t you do it in the gondola? Why didn’t you kill meee!”

“Quickly, stealthily?” came the familiar husky whisper. “And without explanation? The way your men came for me in Rome?”

Carlo narrowed his eyes.

Time, he needed time. Federico had a nose for danger. He would realize something was wrong. He was only just outside this house.

“I want some wine,” Carlo said. His eyes moved to the table, the bone-handled knife in the fowl quite beyond his reach, the goblets, the flask of brandy on its side.

“I want some wine!” His voice thickened. “God damn you, if you did not kill me in the gondola, then give me some wine.”

Tonio was studying him as if he had all the time in the world.

Then with one of those impossibly long arms he reached out and moved the cup towards Carlo.

“Take it. Father,” he said.

Carlo lifted it, but he had to bend his head to drink. He sucked up the wine, washing out the rank taste, and as he lifted his eyes he felt the dizziness so strong surely his head must have fallen heavily to one side.

He drained the cup.

“Give me some more,” he said. That knife was much too far away. Even if he could somehow have tipped this massive table, heavier than the chair in which he sat strapped and helpless, he could not have caught hold of that knife in time.

Tonio lifted the bottle.

Federico would know something was amiss. He would approach the door. The door, the door.

As he was mounting those steps ahead of her, he had heard some loud noise echoing through this place like the boom of a cannon, and some thought in his mind that a woman should not have been able to throw a bolt over the door like that.

But that wouldn’t stop his men.

“Why didn’t you do it?” he demanded suddenly, the cup in both hands. “Why didn’t you kill me before now?”

“Because I wanted to talk to you,” Tonio answered so softly it was a whisper. “I wanted to know…why you tried to kill
me
.” His face, which had been smooth and impassive before now, was coloring with the faintest emotion. “Why did you send assassins for me in Rome when I had done you no harm in four years, and asked nothing of you? Was it my mother who had stayed your hand?”

“You know why I sent them!” Carlo declared. “How long did you plan to wait before you came back for me!” He felt his face flushed and wet, the sweat salty on his lips as he licked them. “Everything you did told me you were coming! You sent for my father’s swords, you spent your life in fencing salons, not six months in Naples you slew another eunuch, and in the next year, put a young Tuscan to rout. Everyone was afraid of you!