The Black Opera (55 page)

“I know what
I
mean, yes. I mean that I know you. If it looks like she's going to be hurt, you'll let her down gently and back away, no matter how much you might care for her.”

It was not often he got to see total shock on Tullio's pugilist-face; he couldn't help enjoying it.

“Make sure you don't back off just because you think she might suffer socially,” Conrad added. “She'll suffer in any case, given what she's like, and she doesn't care. Just… Remember she doesn't take well to being protected.”

“She doesn't.” Tullio shook his head. “Dear God—if Paolo finds out we've been talking about this without asking her, we'll both need protection!”

The laughter was healing, Conrad found. Or that might have been the relief.

Conrad stood up, and turned out the travelling chest that stood locked at the foot of the camp-bed. His hands sifted through spare shirts and found a flat
wooden box with brass clasps.

“I intended to do this before…” Conrad took out one of a pair of Manton flintlock duelling pistols, state of the art, with an octagonal barrel and the bore scratch-rifled. Deadly up to twenty yards. “You can take this.”

For the first time in a long time—years, perhaps—the older man looked outright startled. “That cost a mint! I can't take that! It's one of a pair!”

“And so are you.”

Conrad watched emotions play by lamp-light across Tullio's weathered face.

“Yes, I saved your life in the war. I've lost count of the times you did the same for me. You're far more of a brother than a servant. Take the fucking pistol and practise with it. Brother.”

Tullio stretched out a hand and weighed the pistol that Conrad lay flat on it.

“Seen these shoot,” he observed shortly. “Take off a fly's bollocks. Are you sure?”

“I'm sure.” Conrad closed the lid on the remaining pistol. “Are you sure?”

Tullio gave a slant, weary grin. “I would say this is just to get out of paying me… if you'd
ever
paid me! Sure I'm sure. Find me a powder flask and some moulds, will you?”

The ancient mine-shafts resounded to the painful cracks of pistol shots all that afternoon. Conrad's ears developed a high-pitched whine, and powder gritted between his teeth. The scent of hot metal permeated the carved chambers as Tullio poured melted lead into moulds to make his own ammunition. Conrad found himself grinning at unlikely moments.

It says sad things about a man's life when he finds the smell of gunpowder reassuring
.

The smile didn't leave his face while he made out a new codicil to his Last Will and Testament in Tullio Rossi's favour.

If this goes wrong, I've nothing to leave him. If it goes right, but I don't survive, he'll have Ferdinand's reward. And my debts will be paid off by the King. Paolo—
Isaura
—gets everything else. And won't
that
make the Pironti family spit blood.

The dark of the moon came remorselessly closer.

The Teatro San Carlo had final stage-flats and props finished and added day and night, under heavy guard. The second dress rehearsal took place on the Wednesday, on the stage of the San Carlo.

It turned into what a limping, grunting, newly up-and-about Tullio termed “a complete cat's ear-hole.”

“Four hours of singing.” Roberto looked grey around the mouth. “And the interval lengthened by
thirty minutes
for set-changes.”

Conrad made a stalwart effort to be reassuring. “We only need to get used to this theatre. And we can make cuts.”

JohnJack Spinelli, in the gorgeous feathers and gold armour of the Jaguar General Chimalli, gave Conrad a lethal stare. “Have I ever mentioned that you're hopelessly optimistic?”

“Usually you stick with ‘hopeless.'”

“And
we're not yet complete…” Roberto Capiraso, ignoring the by-play, gave Giambattista Velluti a pacifying glance, and rummaged through the clutch of papers he held. “Conrad!—Act Four, our
primo uomo
is in prison, awaiting execution, and have you got
any
verses for his Hymn of Death yet?”

“The Hymn of Death is going to be the death of me!” Conrad made an attempt to dispel the man's tenseness. “How do you expect an atheist to write a hymn?”

“Quickly!”

Conrad caught the flash of dark humour. He thought it disturbing to find that the man King Ferdinand foisted on him by royal fiat—the man who had stolen Leonora and married her—was also a man remarkably easy to work with.

“I'll do that next,” Conrad promised. “And we might pick up some time if the Act III
stretta
was
faster
than the aria. Places for sextet, please!”

He clapped his hands for attention and turned to his sister.

“Paolo, convince the orchestra this isn't a dirge. Brisker, please! Pretend you have a cabriolet waiting outside and you're paying the driver by the minute…”

That cheered the musicians up enough to undertake yet another run through.

The San Carlo's auditorium, when empty, was overshadowed by its tremendous chandelier. There were no finely-dressed people to take attention from the Bourbon blue and gold of the boxes, all six tiers of them. Standing in the Pit, eyes closed, Conrad felt as if he stood in the focus of a chambered seashell or the ear's canal.

The sextet ground through.

“It wasn't any
worse
with Annicchiarico,” Tullio's voice muttered.

Conrad opened his eyes to see the big man limping over to what was theoretically the best spot to hear the sound.

“There's nothing wrong with it, padrone. Conrad. The tune just doesn't stay in the mind. Not even while they're singing it.”

Conrad was almost glad to find one of the King's aides at his elbow, and to be summoned across to the Palace.

Mist hid all of Naples, and the sea-fog brushed wet and welcome over
Conrad's skin as he crossed the piazza. He turned his face up, and exhaled in relief at being under an open sky.

Something made a sound, as if thunder growled out to sea.

Conrad slowed his steps as he walked along the front of the Palazzo Reale, glancing to the east. It was not thunder. The sea-fog did not break. There was no glow of lava. The grinding together of rocks was unmistakable, however.

Vesuvius's long, slow grumbling and minor tremors excited no notice among the palace soldiers or the people he passed.

He was shown up to the fourth floor of the palace, to a suite that he guessed was one of Ferdinand's private offices. The King sat at a vast green-topped desk, folders and files spread out open before him.

“The Prince's Men are giving us
largesse
…” Ferdinand waved Conrad to sit with a thoughtful hand.

“I don't understand, sir.”

“You'd think, this close to the first night, that their people would
have
to be coming in to Campania with the black opera?” Ferdinand had lines on his plump face that were not there a week ago. “Enrico and his men are covering the borders—I doubt any of them have slept more than three or four hours a night.”

Conrad had sufficient knowledge of the various states' secret police and blacklists of undesirables from personal experience.
No one loves an atheist
. “Has anyone been caught?”

Ferdinand gave a tight-lipped smile.

“That would be the problem… Something on the order of
fifteen hundred
people have entered Campania in the last week alone, all of whom we have solid cause to suspect. The week before, it was just over a thousand. None of them are their inner circle—so far as we know. Each
must
be interrogated.” He sighed. “It seems the Prince's Men have sent in sufficient of their minor agents that we have to run ourselves ragged following and questioning them.”

Conrad blinked. “And meanwhile, the important men quietly take their places?”

“I would imagine so. They come in—or emerge if they're already here. Enrico and his people are swamped taking care of the people we
know
to suspect. The closer we get to the fourteenth, the more decoys are coming in.” Ferdinand turned over pages in a file. “So, yes, the more men who cross our borders openly with suspicious notes against them on their files, the more chance that those who cross borders secretly won't be taken.”

Conrad thought it went without saying that some of those might be double bluffs, and therefore no man could be ignored. “The ones you have. We don't know where they're heading for?”

“I don't ask Enrico and his men what methods they use.” Ferdinand scowled, rubbing at his forehead. “For which I suspect I shall answer, some day. But even so, they have no useful confessions. Those who are Prince's Men are zealots, fanatics… Those who are innocent take up our time and are harmed despite themselves.”

“They have that many people willing to be sacrificed—to be interrogated, to go to prison…” Conrad frowned and slipped, speaking without tact. “I suppose it's obvious now why they killed Signore Castiello-Salvati. He would have been able to help you with this.”

Ferdinand paused.

After that moment, the King said, “Enrico is also watching over those residents that Adriano suspected of being Prince's Men. A fair number of the nobility have vanished over the last week. We can't just imprison their relatives or connections—how would we choose which? All have reasons for why they might be absent—business, time spent back at their estates, tours of foreign countries… I don't know what excuses the common people make.”

The slow grinding of abyssal rock vibrated through the floorboards and walls.

Conrad stayed silent until it faded away. “They're still rehearsing.”

“High earth-tide is certainly coming.” Ferdinand pushed a paper chart of the Tyrrhenean Sea across the desk. It was heavily marked in pencil. “A merchant captain brought me this, from his soundings north of Sardinia. New volcanic reefs, dangerous to shipping. And over here, through the Straits of Medina, something that might be a whole new volcanic island.”

“An
island?”

“Only a few inches above sea-level as yet. I had it claimed for the Kingdoms. It was either that or have the damn English get it. I'm calling it ‘Ferdinandea.'” Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily had a very crooked smile. “It will probably sink back down. They usually do.”

The King's smile faded as he put his finger on the tiny port inlet of Pozzuoli, a few miles west along the coast from Napoli itself. “The Campi Flegrei is full of sulphur steam, boiling mud pools, new small ash cones, craters.”

“I don't suppose we have to worry about sulphur pools if Vesuvius blows,” Conrad said bleakly.

“My Natural Philosophers are interested in how much volcanic lava might lie beneath the Burning Fields. They apparently think it comparable to another volcano such as Vesuvius…”

Conrad said weakly,
“Cazzo.”

Other pencil marks on the map annotated Ætna, Vulcano, Stromboli, the Aeolian Islands. It was not difficult to see what that portended.

Ferdinand rolled up the map and looked at Conrad with brisk enquiry.

Conrad detailed a report. He concluded, “I'm staging another full rehearsal tomorrow.”

“Good. Your new adaptations work? Ah—” The King sat back. “I had Armando Annicchiarico followed, as I promised. He travelled home to his brother's family in Corsica; that was all. You can be relieved about your judgement of character. He has no connection with the Prince's Men.”

A call for a servant had wine served to both of them. Only when it made Conrad's head swim a little did he realise how many hours it had been since he ate.

Too many rehearsals, too many cuts in the old score, too many re-writes of singers' lines to match the new score
—
this is not the state we should be in a few days before opening!

Halfway down the glass, Ferdinand said, “No matter where the black opera is, if we can't identify their singers and musicians in the next few days, we have no way of stopping it going forward.”