The Black Opera (74 page)

“Tullio!”

“—But it's
not
the composer who's the main traitor, it's the composer's creepy dead wife?”

“Leonora is not creepy!”

Tullio looked him up and down. “Padrone—you're a lunatic.”

“After all these years, this comes as a surprise to you?” Conrad wryly quoted the Latin tag he had adopted as his own at the age of sixteen.
“Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit!”

Tullio glared.

“The Roman poet Horace.” Conrad smiled. “‘
That man's either mad—or he's composing verses!'”

The ex-soldier watched the two Colonels arranging lines of exit from various seats. He shuffled forward, towards the front of the box, and Conrad realised Tullio was looking out into the empty auditorium—but not at the gilded coat of arms of the King of the Two Sicilies, or at the chandelier, quivering from tremors too small for the human body to feel.

Tullio's intent gaze picked out the figures on stage, where a slim figure led one of the chorus singers to her correct mark by the hair.

He wants to speak with Paolo, of course.

“Minute or two, now,” Tullio murmured, his tone all business. “My friend and me will be going down to the coach, and leaving Napoli. You
sure
you won't come with me? What you told me about il Superbo… We been out-paced at every stage, it looks like. You
and
Paolo ought to come.”

Conrad gripped the other man's hand hard.

“If I could, I would, I promise. I need to stay here. Paolo's conducting—I wouldn't leave that to the second violin or Roberto.” He winced. It remained natural to call the Count by his given name. “And it looks like I'm going to be
fixing the libretto and rehearsing them
past
the point where the curtain goes up.”

Tullio folded his arms, glaring sullenly down at the figure behind the forte-piano.

“I still don't like it that I'm leaving you behind—still less so now we know Il Conte di Argente is one of the Prince's Men. Bloody arrogant bastard! If the man has betrayed his cause, you can't trust him!”

“You can trust him to do everything a betrayed man would do.” Conrad hoped his hot neck and ears were not visibly pink. “Take a minute while the Colonel gets settled in his coach. Come and see Isaura.”

It took very little time to be done with the royal box after that. The Emperor was escorted outside by Philippe, and Conrad indicated to Tullio the young man in a brown cutaway coat and dishevelled linen cravat, walking away from the violin section.

Tullio deferentially approached the opera's first violin and conductor, and Conrad took up a place further down the wall so that they might finish in peace. Paolo gave his cherub-blush, after a few minutes, and slipped back off into the auditorium.

“He
says he has to conduct,” Tullio Rossi murmured, rejoining Conrad. He gazed after Paolo, seeming perplexed as she joined Roberto Capiraso at the forte-piano.

For a man who changed sides in a fit of pique, the Conte di Argente appeared to be working the others—and himself—to death rehearsing the new material.

Does he now hate his wife that much?

“We've arranged a rendezvous at the coast a bit north of here,” Tullio remarked quietly. “Don't know if I can make it back before the end of
L'Altezza
.”

That bothered him, Conrad could see.

“I'll do my best. Corrado…” Tullio's questioning was discrete. “Will we know what's happening at the
Anfiteatro
before I go?”

Conrad shrugged, digging down into himself for hope. “They
must
have stopped her. Surely. If that was the right place. It's been nearly two hours.”

“Touching faith in humanity you got there, padrone.” Tullio couldn't restrain a grin. It undid all the effect of putting the man into Conrad's second-best formal coat: Tullio looked resoundingly like some bandit
masnadiere
.

Conrad accompanied him back to the coach. It was not entirely surprising that they found Luigi Esposito in conversation with the Colonels.

“Luigi will know.”

“Yes, but do we have anything to barter for gossip?”

Conrad gave an acknowledging smirk.

With a civil-seeming farewell, Luigi Esposito left the foreigners and ambled
back across the yard, all apparent ease.

Conrad suddenly realised that the police captain's white-gloved hands were clasped behind him, almost clenched into fists.

Conrad abandoned any idea of joking. “News?”

Luigi Esposito swept the open back yard of the San Carlo with his gaze—Colonel Philippe and the false ‘Colonel Étienne' tactfully stood discussing the coach horses, as men will—and came back to Conrad.

“Nothing.
Nothing
, Corrado. In the past hour, everything's gone dead.” If Luigi's expression seemed untroubled, his eyes were deeply uneasy. “No rider from Commendatore Mantenucci. No messengers from any of Alvarez's captains. Nothing observed from the campaniles. Since they passed through the Grotto of Posillipo, it's as if over a hundred men have just
vanished
.”

“Che cazzo!”
Conrad found himself patting the dapper man's shoulder in unaccustomed consolation. “If they
have
got into a fight—it's far more likely that messengers have gone astray. The roads are bad out that way. Give it an hour before you panic.”

Luigi Esposito raised a groomed eyebrow. “I'll panic when
I
please, thank you, Corradino!”

He nonetheless returned the clasp of Conrad's hand.

Tullio Rossi gave the police captain a respectful nod as Luigi left. “Speaking of time,
I
need to be going.”

Conrad consulted his watch.
“Merda!
Three hours at best before curtain up!—I have to get back inside—”

He put his hands on Tullio's shoulders, aware of the tension through the older man's body, and knew it to be partly the Emperor's arranged escape, and partly the same thoughts that Conrad found himself subject to, too often now, about any of his friends.

Is this the last time we'll see each other?

He embraced Tullio, with all his strength; the other man thumping him on his back like a brother, with a force that left Conrad breathless.

“I don't like leaving you here!” Tullio sullenly muttered, breaking free. “And you can't trust
her
, wherever she's gone. You know that, don't you?
Minchia!
Why am I bothering—”

“I
know
I can't trust her!”

Tullio Rossi turned and walked towards the front of the coach. He picked up his coach-whip, and threw a handful of coins to the boys holding the horses. Conrad widened his strides to keep up with him, and grabbed Tullio's elbow before the older man could climb up into the box.

“I
know,”
Conrad protested. “Trust me!”

“I trust you to do what I'd do if it was Paolo.” The older man rested the loop of his whip against Conrad's shoulder. “Fight it tooth and nail, and keep looking for
something
that doesn't make her the cunt it looks like she is. Right?”

A tremor ran through Conrad's body, as if the distant caldera echoed his emotion.

“You know me far too well.” He managed to look Tullio in the face. “It's gone beyond not trusting her. Every word that she's said to me since she came to Naples is a lie. Every word in
Venice
.”

Tullio Rossi smiled, almost wistfully. “If you do meet her again—don't let her lie to you again.”

Quite how unlikely he was ever to speak to Nora hit Conrad with the force of knuckles in the kidneys. He was wordless. Then:

“Tullio—if you're able to come back here in the next few hours, then do. If not,
run
. Either way, I trust you to end up in one piece.”

Tullio wrung Conrad's hand with emphatic strength, and mounted nimbly up to the driver's box. The boys loosed the horses's heads; the tip of the whip cracked at the leader's ear. Conrad watched through the skirl of dust as—with a creak of the wooden coach-frame and the scrape of iron-rimmed wheels—the Emperor of the North began his escape from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Tullio grinned crookedly and shouted back to Conrad:

“Be well, Corrado! Don't forget!—if you die doing this, I'll
hurt
you.”

He missed curtain-up.

He had slipped out of the rehearsal rooms fifteen minutes before, into the uplifting brilliancy of the San Carlo's auditorium. The tiers of opera boxes overpowered him, all six floors full of the nobility and important officials who owned them. Not a few had snuffed out their candles to see the bright stage the better. The blue and gold interior of the royal box filled up fast; Ferdinand shaking hands with nobles, dignitaries, and ambassadors; their wives in jewel-coloured dresses and white diamonds curtseying to show off their plump shoulders.

Conrad, down in the pit with the ordinary citizens of Naples—who gambled, gestured, and conversed at the tops of their voices—looked up at Colonel Étienne, beside King Ferdinand. Étienne appeared to be producing an excellent, over-emotional impression of his sovereign. Colonel Philippe looked as if he saved up the experience for recounting (with appropriate satisfaction) to the true Emperor.

Before anyone could ask Conrad what he was grinning at, he had pushed his way through the crowds and back into the theatre's private areas.

Tremors now ran irregularly through the building. The nerves of the principal singers appeared to respond in a similar manner. Principals, chorus, and those musicians chosen for the on-stage
banda
flowed through the narrow corridors and tiny staircases, past Conrad. In and out of dressing-rooms, with curses, trips, and panic kept down to a sacrilegious murmur.

“Corrado!” Sandrine squeaked. “Hear that romanza? I have
seven minutes
before my entrance; I need you to hear the variations on my first aria!”

“You'll be fine, but of course.” Conrad stepped into one of the ancient rehearsal rooms with the mezzo.

He discovered his attention was not on Sandrine (true-voiced; holding back two-thirds of her intensity for the performance) but on the Prince's Men.

Where are they?
What are they doing? Do we have anything else to fear, over and above the black opera?

I'm waiting for the Prince's Men to make a significant attack on the San Carlo theatre.

A mechanical clock and a percussion cap would make a bomb.

Although as likely to blow
them
up as us—

Conrad tore his mind away from speculatory conversations in the cavalry mess, years ago. Sandrine—and then Estella, and then Lorenzo—needed his assistance, and he functioned as an amateur
recitateur
, hearing lines; and adjusted any part of the new verses that turned out to be unsingable.

JohnJack mastered the new stage business of breaking free from his guards—rather than being led off to prison—and springing between the Princess and King Charles of Spain. He still dropped his sword every time he drew it.

“Merda!”

Sandrine practised as the costumiers gave up and sewed her into her green and gold serpent-embroidered robe, since the buttons couldn't be set right in the time.

Brigida and Lorenzo fell out spectacularly and there was no opportunity to set it to music.

Like a sudden wave, an unexpected silence swept through the dark, crowded, cramped backstage areas.

Conrad's mouth went dry. He heard, in the distance, front of house, Paolo bringing the
Sinfonia's
first bars soaring up.

Dio! How could I miss it!

Soprano and mezzo chorus voices joined the intensity of the music. With a jolt, Conrad realised Velluti was gone from the rehearsal rooms—must already be at the back of the stage, mounting the placid white mare that would give him his
coup de théâtre
entrance.

Despite the muffling distance—stage flats, half-open doors, corridors stacked with ancient boxes there since Nero's time; the stifling warm bodies of the all-male chorus, tenor and baritone, massed to go on as Hernand Cortez's army—the audience's roar was clearly audible all through backstage.