The Black Opera (28 page)

“It would have been easier if they'd jumped me in a dark alley, like I expected. My damned father! Leaving the family like this? What was he
thinking?”

“From what you've said about him, padrone, he was probably thinking ‘the next one'll make me really rich!' Isn't that what every gambler thinks?”

Conrad clenched his fists and forced himself not to smash everything breakable within reach.

“I should be used to this by now! If I have to eat shit sandwich served up to me by some doddering conspirator, it's because of my father! If I have to pay three-quarters of everything I earn to other people, it's because of—And if—Damn it—
Alfredo Scalese, answer for your sins!
”

The ancient formula belonged to the Church. Conrad hated using it. Particularly so soon after the ghost had visited him voluntarily.

His one satisfaction, he thought grimly, as he watched a spectre manifest, was that Alfredo plainly believed it compelled him.

The temperature in the lodgings dropped more than could be accounted for by the deepening dark. Alfredo Scalese, or Alfred Amsel, as he had been born,
manifested by Conrad's desk, one hip hitched up so that he sat on the desk's edge, and every part of his attitude speaking of the easy-going man-about-town. The light from the oil lamps shone through him.

“So soon, Corradino? How pleasant to see you again—”

“I've been quiet for nine years!” Conrad stepped as close to the ghost as he could without intersecting it, glaring into the translucent eyes. “You're my father, I've been paying off your debt all my life, and here it is bollocking everything up again. Is there no way to be rid of these debts?”

The ghost tapped his forefinger on his lower lip; a pose so artificial that Conrad would have punched him if it were only possible.

“I suppose you might poison that old man, and burn his correspondence if you can get at it. Deny everything…” Alfredo shrugged, his amusement as transparent as his body. “Really, Conrad. You can't be serious. You should do whatever you want to do. Something will always turn up.”

“You feckless son of a bitch!”

Unmoved, the ghost-image of a man shrugged. “Being feckless is good—it's duty and honour that have you in danger of the debtor's prison, isn't it?”

Despite his father being immaterial, Conrad picked up his silver-plated ink-well, that was weighted with solid lead, and hurled it through the ghost.

Tullio flinched at how close the smash came to the glass chimney of one lamp. Regarding the spray of ink up the scarred wallpaper, he muttered, “Padrone—I know this has been building for nine years, but tell him without breaking our lodgings up—we had enough of that recently.”

“Yes, Corradino.” Alfredo beamed. “You shouldn't be so irresponsible.”

“Irresponsible.”
Conrad reached blindly for whatever he could find, with eyes for nothing but his father's immaterial fatuous smile. “So I should be responsible and default on your debt, should I? Refuse to pay? It's the law! I'm your son! Tell me how I can ‘fecklessly' evade your creditors and still keep the name and reputation I've been making for myself!”

The spectre lounged to his feet, smoothing down his cuffs. “I'll come back when you've stopped throwing tantrums.”

Conrad turned around and leaned his arms on the window-frame, and his forehead against the cold glass. Rage against injustice, and shame for speaking that way to his father, left him motionless and speechless.

He saw in the window's reflective dark surface how Alfredo Scalese shook his head in apparent sadness, and disappeared.

“Cazzo!”

Conrad left the window, and dropped onto the sofa beside Tullio. Urgency pressed in on him.

“Is this too—too
little
—for the Prince's Men?” he wondered aloud. “But I don't know who else would be my enemy.”

Tullio snorted. “I know of at least one man who's a financier and has no cause to like you, padrone.”

“Argente?”

“Keep you out of the way of his wife, maybe?”

Conrad thought it through briefly. “He wouldn't do it. If nothing else, he won't offend the King. He's a Neapolitan Count; Ferdinand could strip him of his estates.”

A quirk of Tullio's mouth signalled assent. “That only leaves the Prince.”

“And we don't have much time. I'll be watched. I need
you
to go to the King. But change your clothes first—”

Tullio put up one broad-fingered hand, his smile sympathetic. “I got it, padrone. Want me to wear a false nose, too?”

“I don't know about a false nose, but I could certainly give you a black eye,” Conrad grumbled amiably, watching Rossi reach for his army greatcoat, and turn the collar up against wind and spies. “No—wait.”

Tullio cocked his head, the picture of a man waiting for instruction.

“That won't work,” Conrad said decisively. “They will have checked these lodgings after what went on with the Holy Office. We have no guarantee they're not still watching. If they take note of servants, your face will be known.”

The ex-sergeant shook his head. “It's all right, padrone. I understand. These ‘Prince's Men'—they were just a bogeyman until now. But now you met one of them, and he's smart and dangerous.”

Conrad shifted on the sofa.

Tullio thrust his fists into the greatcoat's pockets. “I'm not going to be scared off by a gang of amateurs either, padrone. We saw worse in the war. If they was a real secret society, there'd be bodies along the foreshore from the harbour to Castell dell'Ovo, and we'd be worrying about assassination attempts on his Majesty. Right?”

“One body was enough.” Restless, Conrad stood again, and paced the small amount of space in front of the hearth.

“I know who's not so known,” Tullio inelegantly said. “And how they could be even less so.”

“Who—oh. Yes. Yes…”

It didn't take Tullio long to fetch her out of the lower floor of the lodging-house, where she had been gossiping—although they were interrupted by half a dozen conversations on the way up the stairs with other tenants, culminating in the landlady. Tullio finally had to shut the door with his foot.

“Holy Baby Jesus!” Isaura remarked—or rather Paolo, Conrad registered, in smart man-about-town clothes.

Tullio sounded oddly apologetic. “Padrone needs your help.”

Paolo smirked. “Nothing new there. Is there, big brother?”

Their confidence buoyed him up, somehow, even if he thought it unjustified. Conrad went briskly through the visit by Adalrico Silvestri, with only a pause for Isaura's opinions of their father's behaviour—not significantly different from Conrad's.

“I need you to take a letter to King Ferdinand—to the palace, and put it directly into his own hand.”

Gianpaolo's eyes widened, the man-about-town subsumed instantly into the shy beanpole girl. “They might have seen me come in here. They'll know who I am—they might take your letter!”

Conrad stopped her rush of words with a raised hand. “Look—we'll disguise you! In a dress!”

There was a pause.

The young woman in man's clothing alternately glared at him, and at Tullio Rossi. The ex-sergeant put his hand casually over his mouth, stifling entirely unmanly giggles. Conrad avoided Tullio's gaze, and the ex-sergeant as assiduously looked away from him.

Very dryly, Isaura remarked,
“Thank
you, brother…”

Caught between laughing and feeling uncomfortable, Conrad said, “Isaura—You don't have to do this, because I never want to put you into danger. If you
do
do it, Tullio will ask a couple of his mates from upstairs to go disguised as your servants—a respectable woman wouldn't be out without a pair of footman, especially in the early evening. No one will look at you and see Gianpaolo Pironti.”

“If the Prince's Men murder me, I'll haunt you too,” Isaura muttered. “Judging by the evidence, our family's good at making a spectral annoyance of itself—so you better hope I come back safe.”

“I do.” Conrad hugged her as if she were a young woman and his sister, not the man she was dressed as. He couldn't help the weakness of appreciating the comfort he got when she hugged him in return.

“Damn petticoats!—Yes, I understand why I have to!” Isaura snorted. “Let's get this done, then.”

It was not Conrad's habit to pace the floor, but he made a circuit of checking the view through both windows and the stairwell outside the lodgings. The stairs
were dark. The new gas lighting in their one main thoroughfare was not much better.

“I shouldn't have sent her.”

He attempted to sit and listen to the voices of Naples below the front room balcony, and lose himself in the search for incidents among the Aztec and European characters which would spur the emotional drama that is opera.

Ten minutes later, he was on his feet again.

There were only seven paces between the bedroom door and the living room door; he counted them repeatedly. The noise from the street outside did not die down, but he could hear nothing that sounded like violence.

“She's a woman. She's my sister.”

“She's Gianpaolo Pironti,” Tullio said, from where he sat with his feet resting on the brick hearth surround. He leaned forward and carefully placed another lump of coal in the grate, against the chill off the sea.
“And
she's spent three years at that Conservatoire in Catania. After that, she either knows what to do with a pistol, or she's expert in getting out of trouble before it starts.”

Conrad halted. “She has a pistol?”

“I might have… loaned her my old infantry pistol. Just the right size for carrying in a fur muff, I thought.”

Before Conrad could challenge that, the outer door banged open.

Isaura walked in with more of a stride than a young woman should.

Tullio went out to talk with his mates on the landing, and Conrad followed Isaura—who went straight into his bedroom and began unlacing her skirts and bodice without ceremony, looking with longing at her shirt and trousers laid out on his bed.

“Damn, I hate courtiers!” She kicked off her shoes. “They gave me the run-around for hours on end.”

Conrad stepped back out of the room and pulled the door mostly closed in front of him, while she dressed; content to hold his conversation through the gap. “You did get the message to him? When will Ferdinand see me? Tonight?—It's late—”

The door opened. Isaura had her loose shirt pulled on and tucked in, and was unselfconsciously buttoning the fall-front flap of her breeches. Her cropped hair flopped out of the hair-pins that had kept it disguised under a bonnet. She ran her fingers through it, sending a clatter of pins across the floor.

“No.” Her expression was serious. “I couldn't give him the message. The King's not in the Palace.”

Conrad stared, more disoriented than if she had been speaking Classical Greek. “Not in the…”

“I finally got it out of one of his damn gentleman-in-waiting,” Isaura said. “He's not even in Naples. King Ferdinand left the city this morning.”

“‘L
eft the city.'” Conrad considered that for thirty heartbeats.

Tullio's
“Vaffanculo!”
was over-ridden by his own English-learned:
“Fuck it up the arse backwards!”

Tullio broke the following silence. “You game to try again, Signore Paolo?”

“Of course.” Isaura lowered her chin, having successfully tied her linen cravat. “I planned to go back out—it was getting late for a lone woman, even with your friends accompanying her… Shall we?”

Conrad stood up, not realising until then that he had sat down on the coach like a sack of meal. “You'll be recognised!”

“That's a risk we have to take.” Isaura-Paolo got in just before Tullio. “We need to know, brother. Where the King's gone—
if
he left—or if that's just a cover-up story, and he's sick or assassinated.”