Die Upon a Kiss (17 page)

January glanced up from the smudged pages and blinked in the pale morning sunlight that fell through the French windows and into the rear bedroom of Olympe’s cottage on Rue Douane. “I’m at a loss to decide how one man may call another a
stronzolo
without intending insult.”

“Possibly he meant an aromatic and socially useful
stronzolo.”
Hannibal, who had brought him the paper at Olympe’s after not finding him
chez
Bontemps, sat on the smaller of the little room’s two beds, which in ordinary circumstances was shared by Olympe’s daughter, Chouchou—aged five—and her two-year-old brother, Ti-Paul. A low fire burned in the room’s small hearth, welcome after the morning’s chill, and he held out his hands to it like one who never expected to be warm again. “Care to hear Belaggio’s apology?”

“What does it amount to?”

“That everyone in the ballroom mis-heard him, presumably including his second. At no time did he ever intend etc. etc.” Hannibal stood and took the paper from January’s hand. In the yard beyond the French doors, fourteen-year-old Zizi-Marie helped her father stretch and fit stiff black horsehair over the framework of a curve-legged chair, amid neat piles of the dark, wiry moss that made such excellent upholstery. Taller already than most boys of twelve, young Gabriel emerged from the kitchen, the ladle in his hand giving off steam like a banner in the cold, and asked something of Chouchou, who was stirring alum into a big clay jar of rainwater to purify it for drinking; little Ti-Paul gravely lined up fragments of kindling in order of size on the bricks by the kitchen door. Looking worriedly down at the chalk-white face of the woman on the bed, Hannibal said, “She hasn’t wakened, has she?”

“Olympe tells me she came around enough last night to be taken to the privy.” January sighed, and gently touched Marguerite Scie’s hand. “She tried to get her to drink a little water, but she doesn’t think she actually swallowed any. She hasn’t stirred since.” The ballet mistress’s hands were cold. Her breath was barely sufficient to lift the clean starched linen that covered her breast. The eyelids, beginning to wrinkle like an old woman’s, did not move.

January wondered if she dreamed, and of what. “No word from the Gouger about the Gower boys?”

“Not yet.” Hannibal sounded worn to thread-paper, but January knew he was playing at one of the taverns that afternoon, for reales and dimes—the girls at Kentucky Williams’s as often as not would get him drunk and go through his pockets for whatever he’d earned the night before. “Can I get you anything?”

Out in the Rue Douane a woman’s voice sang, “Berry pies, cherry pies, mince and quince and peary pies!” and farther off was answered by the wailing, dreary singsong of the charcoal man. On the house opposite, posters had gone up, enormous letters proclaiming THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO above stylized figures in powdered wigs and skirted coats, gesturing alarm, adoration, delight. AN OPERA BY MR. W. A. MOZART. There were at least six posters in a line, covering over the earlier poster, which had advertised:

LA MUETTE DE PORTICI
Musical Spectacle and Excitement
PRODUCTION BY JOHN DAVIS, FRENCH OPERA HOUSE

“Nothing,” said January. He looked down again at Marguerite’s sunken face, wondering what the police would say about the marks on her throat, were she to die.

“I’ll be here all day, if you hear. If you’d care to return for supper, I’m sure Olympe would put another plate on the table before the performance.”

“Thank you.” Hannibal shrugged a worn plaid shawl around his shoulders and put on his hat. The bullet-fund for Marsan had actually been spent on beer for the musicians after the rehearsal; Trulove assured everyone that following the performance, a collation would await the cast backstage, courtesy of the St. Mary Opera Society. “I must say I’m astonished that we’ve made it as far as the premiere performance of the season, and confess to a certain degree of curiosity about what will happen tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Of course.” Hannibal paused in the doorway to the front bedroom—no good Creole entered or left a house through the parlor—and regarded January with raised brows. “You don’t think Incantobelli’s going to let his enemy get away with an uneventful show, do you? I’m only hoping that the assault takes the form of a direct attack on Belaggio—say, a garrote in one of the corridors outside the boxes—instead of a bullet fired from the gallery, which could hit anyone in the orchestra. Or maybe something simpler, like burning down the theater.”

January shut his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, and hoped that in the event of mayhem, John Davis would have a good alibi for his own whereabouts. “O Sable-vested Night, eldest of things,” he said. “I can hardly wait.”

“She’s locked in her dressing-room.” Julie, the dresser’s assistant whose exclusive assignment to La d’Isola had caused such heart-burning among the rest of the female cast, twisted her hands in distress and cast a frantic eye at the box-clock. “The door’s bolted from the inside, but I heard her moan.”

“Mille diavoli!”
Cavallo strode toward the gallery steps, tearing off hat and greatcoat. “Drusilla! Drusilla . . . !”

“What is it?” January sprang up the last three steps from the prop-vault in time to see the tenor’s hasty ascent. “What’s happened?”

“Drusilla is ill.” Emerging from his own office, Belaggio looked ill himself, far more shaken than even the sudden indisposition of his beloved might warrant. “She was perfectly well, gay and happy, when we parted this afternoon. . . .”

“Has she had anything to eat?” In his days as surgeon, half of January’s patients had turned out to be ill from spoiled food. Though not, it was true, at this time of year.

“We lunched with Signor Trulove, but like a true
artista,
she ate no more than a light omelette, a little fruit. . . .”

“I took the Signorina up a bowl of soup just after she came in,” provided Madame Rossi. She looked harried and put out—as well she might, thought January, eyeing the half-dozen milkmaid’s gowns piled in her arms. “She told me earlier to have one ready. . . .”

“Why did she lock herself in?” From the gallery above, January could hear Cavallo rattling the door of the big corner dressing-room, calling La d’Isola’s name.

Belaggio shook his head and looked around him helplessly. Everyone was milling about incompletely costumed in the midst of the Contessa’s gilt-trimmed bedroom furniture and segments of Mount Vesuvius. Sable-vested Night was well and truly on its way, and patrons were lined up already outside all three of the theater’s doors. “Perhaps,” offered Hannibal, coming up the steps in January’s wake, “she wished to take a nap and feared some ill-intentioned person might slip into her dressing-room and put a piece of glass in her shoe, or a roach in her wig.”

“Who would do such a thing?” cried Madame Montero. She was wearing, January noticed, the Countess’s pink-and-gold gown from Act Two, considerably too tight in the bodice, as it was made to fit d’Isola’s slimmer form.

“Signor.” January pulled his notebook from his jacket pocket and began to scribble on a blank page. “Might one of the stage-hands be sent to this number in the Rue Douane? It’s a gold-colored cottage. My sister Olympe is a midwife; she understands local fevers.” There seemed no point in saying that Olympe was a voodoo who knew all about poisons; Tiberio snatched the note from Belaggio’s hand as he beckoned one of the two stage-hands who had been hired that afternoon.

“Unless you wish to set the stage yourself you send Julie.”

“Julie!” Oona Flaherty, who had been following the criss-cross of French and Italian with difficulty, grasped at least the name and yanked the paper from the little man’s fingers. “And the lot of us standin’ about in our corsets with our faces hangin’ out bare as eggs?” It was not specifically her face that was hanging out bare as eggs, mused January, though she was, indeed, in her corset. . . .

“I’ll go.” Bruno Ponte, still in street trousers and a shirt, took the note, scooped up his rough tweed jacket, and departed.

“Lorenzo”—January heard Montero’s voice behind him as he climbed the gallery steps—“if, God forbid, Drusilla is unable to sing, I could do the part. You know I am able to do it. . . .”

And you just happen to have been through it
recently. . . .

Cavallo still stood by the dressing-room door. “Is there another key?” asked January, and the young tenor shook his head.

The smell of vomit crept nauseatingly from the room. Three smaller dressing-chambers opened straight off the gallery, the rest being cramped cubicles partitioned from the long rooms devoted to the female and male cast members at large. The corner room, January knew, in addition to its palatial appointments, possessed a stout door to ensure quiet, and, it appeared, a lock to safeguard both privacy and security for whatever the most favored cast member might have in the way of necklaces or stick-pins.

“I looked. It would have been in Caldwell’s office.” His dark curls rumpled, his face drawn with concern, Cavallo had a boyish air, like a worried student. “But the door is bolted from within. Could it be broken?”

“No!” Caldwell wailed, struggling up a stair jammed with cast, chorus, and curious musicians. “Don’t break it!”

“She can’t be left there.” January fished in his music-satchel for his stethoscope, which he generally carried, along with a scalpel and narrow-nosed forceps, just in case. He put the end of the boxwood tube to the panels and listened as well as he could—everyone who’d pushed up onto the gallery seemed to have advice to give or anecdotes to relate concerning personal experiences of a similar nature. Above the level of the backstage gasolier, the dim air was suffocating.

“No, of course not.” Caldwell slithered and wriggled to January’s side. “But breaking the door won’t be necessary. When the theater was built we’d already gotten William Pelby—nobody remembers him now, but ten years ago he was one of the greatest tragedians in America—”

“I remember Pelby,” declared the bass Cepovan, his face already embellished with old Antonio the gardener’s whiskers and wrinkles. “I never thought him above average.”

“Heymann was better,” added Chiavari’s husband, Trevi.

“Not as Rolla in
Pizarro
!” protested Mademoiselle Rutigliano, the company’s mezzo—whose name was actually Lucy Schlegdt, from Basle. “In Philadelphia two years ago—”

“Pelby was to perform
Macbeth
at the theater’s opening,” Caldwell went on, ignoring the argument about the two men’s relative merits, which quickly spread down the stairs. “The dressing-room was built with him in mind. He was—er—something of a ladies’ man. One of his stipulations was a private entrance. A private stairway.”

“Leading from where?” January mentally tried to orient the rooms of the theater’s rear. “The stable yard of the Promenade Hotel?”

“Oh, the hotel wasn’t built until ’twenty-nine,” said Caldwell. “There was just a vacant lot on St. Charles Avenue. You could still get in that way if we can find the key. It should be on a nail with the others in my office.”

Of course it wasn’t.

“Hannibal . . .”

In addition to his talents on the violin, Hannibal Sefton was a reasonably gifted forger. He had, January gathered, studied antique orthography at Balliol College, Oxford, and put the knowledge to use producing various unauthorized documents, most frequently freedom papers for the runaway slaves who drifted into New Orleans by the hundreds every year. One of these individuals had repaid the favor by instructing him in the techniques of lock-picking, a skill January gathered he was passing along to the ever-inquiring Rose.

It was a tight squeeze between the moss-grown, filthy bricks of the stable-yard wall and the grubby and peeling planks of the theater. The stable yard drained into the slit between the two walls, and it was quite clear that whatever garbage and offal the hotel servants didn’t particularly want to haul down the alley to Camp Street found a final resting-place there as well. Cavallo and Caldwell followed January and Hannibal in, oil-lamps upraised to illuminate Hannibal’s assault on the private door’s lock with a bent bullet probe and long-snouted forceps from January’s bag, and a buttonhook borrowed from Madame Montero.

“The Lord looseth men out of prison,”
coaxed Hannibal, angling his head to avoid his own shadow. “Why so recalcitrant, my love? ‘Had we but world enough and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime. . . .’ ”

“If Drusilla comes to harm,” growled Cavallo, “I’ll personally thrash that Mexican bitch. . . .”

“Now, we don’t know that she had anything to do with this!” pleaded Caldwell, unnerved at the prospect of both Countesses being put out of commission an hour before curtain-time.

“Got it,” said Hannibal.

The four men clambered up the narrow steps that wormed between two dressing-rooms and a closet, lamplight splashing around them on a stuffy universe of mouse-droppings and cobweb. The narrow door at the top was painted incongruously bright yellow and green, to match the decor of the room into which it opened.

The smell of vomit hit January even in the stairway, infinitely stronger as he thrust on the door. The inflowing lamp-gleam showed him the screen that hid the chamberpot knocked down, a chair lying on its side, and a crumpled form curled up on the floor between the chamberpot and the daybed. No candles burned. She’d been lying there since before dusk.

“Drusilla!” Cavallo fell to his knees at her side, almost dropping his lamp.
All we’d need,
thought January, catching it up—he had a lifelong performer’s dread of theater fires. At the brassy brightness on her eyelids the soprano moaned, then gagged and reached for the overflowing chamberpot again.

Cavallo held the young woman steady as she retched, unable to come up with more than a little saliva. “Get water.” January set the lamp on the marble-topped dressing-table. Hannibal shoved back the door-bolt and sprinted straight into the entire cast of
Le Nozze di Figaro.