by Donna Leon
‘I had trouble with the slow tempo,’ she answered.
‘Yes,’ Flavia said thoughtfully, ‘it’s one of the problems with it, especially if you’re working with a conductor who tries to drag it out and make it last longer.’ Just as she was trying to drag out her own every word and make them last longer, the better to warn Brunetti that they were coming towards him or moving away from him. ‘On the stage,’ she said with added volume, ‘it’s easier, I think, and it usually works.’
The woman stopped and wheeled Flavia around to face her. ‘I told you I want to work on the last scene, not “Vissi d’arte”.’ She gave Flavia a close look, and Flavia saw her eyes for the first time. ‘There’s too much emotion.’
Stunned into silence by the woman’s remark, Flavia nodded and was unable to stop herself from taking a half-step backwards.
A vice closed on her arm, pressing a nerve against the bone, either intentionally or accidentally, but that really didn’t matter, did it? Does she want to see my pain? she wondered, or is it safer for me to ignore it?
‘The third act,’ Flavia asked thoughtfully. ‘From where?’
‘From when they come up the steps,’ she answered.
‘Hmmm,’ Flavia said. ‘There’s a great deal of shouting, and the music is very intense, so you’ve got to be careful to pitch your voice above all of that.’ She thought she’d risk it and began just as the soldiers came rushing up the stairs to the roof. ‘All she says, really, is “Morto, morto, o Mario, morto tu, così”.’ It was a trick she often used at dinners or parties, to jump into a part and go from talking in a normal voice to singing at full voice.
The vice clamped down again, and the woman yanked her close. Like a mouse watching the cat draw near, Flavia could do nothing but stare at her, then down at her own imprisoned hand. She watched another hand, this one with a knife, approach her own, and she watched as the woman drew the blade very slowly over the back of her prisoner’s hand, lightly, a steel caress that left a small red line behind when she lifted the blade from the skin. ‘Don’t make so much noise,’ she said. ‘Not until we’re on the stage.’
Flavia nodded and watched as the tiny droplets bubbled to the surface of her skin and joined together like raindrops on the window of a train. Which one would drop off first? she caught herself wondering.
The woman pulled back a red fire door, and they were on the stage.
28
Brunetti and Vianello, standing just outside the main stage curtain and hidden by it, could not be seen from the stage, although the small opening between the ends of the curtain allowed them a view of the area illuminated by the safety lights. The ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo, its wall cut back and open in part to allow the audience to see the surface, were visible to them both, as they had not been while they were standing at the sides. They saw Flavia plunge through the fire door on to the stage and come up short as the woman behind her yanked her by the arm. The dimness made it impossible to read their expressions, but Flavia’s terror was evident in her awkwardness and in the way she flinched from the woman’s every move.
Neither man moved, neither breathed as the taller woman led Flavia across the stage and to the bottom of the steps leading to the roof and ramparts. The sword-bearing Archangel Michael flew above them; Brunetti whispered a hope to him that he would help defeat the enemy.
Brunetti watched the woman with the knife shove a resistant Flavia to the first step, where she balked and shook her head defiantly. The woman yanked Flavia around to face her, put the knife on the centre of her stomach, then leaned forward to whisper something he could not hear. Flavia’s face froze with raw terror, and he thought he could hear her whispered ‘No. Please.’ She lowered her head and went limp for a few seconds, as if stabbed, then nodded weakly two or three times and turned back towards the stairs. She put one foot on the bottom step and, hauling herself up with her left hand, walked slowly to the top, the woman with the knife on her right.
Flavia stopped short on the last step, for the staircase brought her out only metres from the place from which she had leaped to her death less than an hour before. No attempt had been made to disassemble the stage setting, he saw, and someone had forgotten to pick up the blue soldier’s cloak that had been tossed over Mario’s corpse. A rifle was carelessly propped against the wall by the top of the staircase. The strike had brought work to a stop, and the ramparts would stand there until it was settled.
He saw Flavia approach the cloak; the woman, still attached to her arm like a limpet, stopped her and said something to her.
Brunetti tapped Vianello on the shoulder and pointed to the staircase, then to his own chest and made tiny walking motions with two fingers. He started off to the right: if he entered the stage from that side, neither woman would be able to see him, just as he would lose sight of them. When he slipped around the edge of the curtain into the wings he heard their voices, but it was not until he reached the bottom of the steps that he could distinguish the words.
‘This is the place where you sing from, so you have to be sure to be facing out when you sing, or your voice won’t reach the audience,’ he heard Flavia say in a strained voice. ‘If I turn away,’ she began, her voice growing smaller, ‘they don’t hear me as well as they do when I turn back to them,’ she finished, her voice now back to full volume. ‘Remember how big the orchestra is: more than seventy musicians. If you don’t sing loud enough, they’ll cover you and block you out.’
‘Should I move to the other side of his body?’ the woman asked.
‘Yes. Good. That way you’re naturally facing the audience, and you’re also keeping an eye on the stairway because it’s the only way up to the roof, and that’s where Scarpia’s men will have to come from to get you.’ Brunetti took this for a message sent out like a note in a bottle.
From above him, Brunetti heard footsteps and used their sound to cover the noise he made starting up the steps. When the noise of their footsteps stopped, he froze, halfway up.
‘Let me stand between you and the steps so I’ll hear if your voice will carry above all that competition.’ Then, a second later, ‘I’m not moving away. I want some perspective in watching you, and I have to have some idea of how your voice is projecting.’ With exhaustion, not irony, Flavia said, ‘Besides, there’s nowhere I can go up here, is there?’ If the woman gave an answer, Brunetti didn’t hear it.
‘All right, start from, “Andiamo. Su”,’ he heard Flavia say in the commanding voice of a teacher. Good for her to assert some authority this way, though he had doubts about her chance of success.
‘No, lower, right down to his face. You have to bend down as if he’s alive, and when you sing, “Presto. Su”, you have to sound happy, and the “su” really has to sing. You’ve just played a tremendous joke on them all, and now the two of you are going to escape and go to Civitavecchia and sail away, and you’ll live happily ever after.’ Flavia stopped and Brunetti could sense her thinking about that. People can live happily, many do, and certainly she had spent great portions of her life living happily, but no one lived happily ever after. No one lived ever after.
He climbed up another two steps until his head was two stairs from the top, then backed down one and sat, hunched down to keep his head well hidden.
A woman’s voice that was not Flavia’s cried out, ‘“Presto! Su, Mario. Andiamo”’ – rough, entirely without emotion or beauty – but she had no sooner sung the words than Flavia cried out, ‘No, not like that. You have to be happy. You’re bringing him good news. He’s alive, and you’re both safe. You’re going to live.’ Had Flavia’s voice not cracked on the last word, Brunetti would have judged it a perfect performance.
To cover it, Flavia said, voice louder, ‘Now try the “Morto, morto”, but you have to throw your heart into it. She knows he’s dead now, and she’s intelligent enough to know she’s going to die next, and soon.’
‘Show me how it should sound,’ the woman said evenly. ‘I don’t understand how it s
hould sound.’
‘“Morto, morto”,’ came Flavia’s choked response, and then, ‘“Finire così. Così? Povera Flavia.”’ It was chilling. It was the voice of someone who knew that she was going to die, and soon. The good times were over. Mario was dead, and she was next.
Brunetti had brought his gun, but he knew he was as likely to hit one of them as the other. He had always treated practice as a useless bother, and this was the result: to be this close to someone about to commit a murder and not to be able to stop them. If he stood up suddenly, she was as likely to stab Flavia as to attack him.
‘Her name is Floria, not Flavia,’ the woman corrected her.
‘Yes, of course,’ he heard Flavia say, and then she made a noise, half sob, half hiccup.
‘That’s when she sees them, isn’t it?’ the woman asked.
‘Yes. They come up the steps.’
Was that a signal, a request, or only what happened in the opera? Flavia’s voice gave no sign.
‘And that’s when she goes up on the wall?’
‘Yes. Over here. It’s a low wall. They always make it that way so you have no trouble stepping up on it, and, besides, it looks higher to the people in the audience.’
‘But what about jumping?’
‘There’s a giant mattress on a platform behind. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you bounce up, and the people in the galleries see part of you.’ Flavia’s voice was calm again, easy and almost chatty. ‘It happened to me in Paris once, years ago. A few people laughed, but nothing else. This one is made of about ten layers of rubber and plastic mattresses. It’s lovely to fall on it.’ But then Flavia pulled the woman’s – and Brunetti’s – attention away by saying, ‘You have to be careful when you call out Scarpia’s name and say that you’ll see him in front of God. She’s killing herself, and she’ll be judged for that, but she’s sure she’ll be forgiven. And she’s reminding Scarpia’s soul that he will be judged at the same time and there’ll be no forgiveness for him.’
‘But he loved her,’ the woman said, her confusion audible.
‘But she didn’t love him,’ Flavia said, and he heard the resignation in her voice, as if she knew these words might kill her but didn’t care any longer.
He heard nothing for a long time and decided to risk taking a look. He raised his head above the level of the floor and turned in the direction of the voices. He saw Flavia looking towards the absent spectators, the woman standing next to her but turned away and showing Brunetti her back. Flavia, dressed casually in sweater and slacks, still wore the full makeup of Tosca, though the tiara and the wig were gone. Her features were exaggerated and, this near to her, with the makeup rubbed around in places and sweated off in others, grotesque.
Flavia stepped on to the rampart and, looking past the woman, who was still below her, saw Brunetti. Her expression changed not in the least. She reached down to help the woman on to the low wall, but she ignored Flavia’s outstretched hand, as she ignored the blood on the back of it, and stepped, not without difficulty, up beside her. She stretched out her arms to maintain her balance, the knife coming so close to Flavia’s face that she had to pull her head back quickly to avoid it.
Brunetti ducked his head down and looked back at the curtain. Vianello’s ghost-face was visible in the small opening. Brunetti signalled to him, and Vianello held up a single finger and waved it back and forth in a quick negative. Brunetti kept his head down and listened.
‘Yes, he did love her,’ Flavia said with fierce agreement. ‘But Tosca didn’t love him and wants him damned. That’s what you have to convey if you want the scene to work.’ No sooner had Brunetti registered the anger in her tone than Flavia removed it and said with warm encouragement, ‘Just give it a try. Your voice can be ragged if you want it to be, so long as you convey her hatred. It might even help.’
‘My voice is never ragged,’ the other woman objected.
‘Of course not,’ Flavia said hastily, as if she wanted to waste no time commenting on the self-evident. ‘What I meant is that you can force it to sound ragged for the effect of it. Like this.’ And she showed her what to do, stopping after, ‘O, Scarpia’.
‘What do you think?’ Flavia asked. ‘The raw quality makes her anger real. After all, she has reason to be angry.’ Hearing the way she said that, Brunetti pushed his head up to see what the source of such rage could be. Had the woman menaced her with the knife?
No, she still stood there, facing Flavia, hanging on her every word. And Flavia said, ‘Put your arms out, raise them up to Heaven, where you think God is waiting for you, and call Scarpia’s name.’ The woman remained motionless, facing Flavia, speechless.
‘Go ahead, try it. It’s scenes like this that liberate singers,’ Flavia said.
From behind her, Brunetti watched first the woman’s left arm rise and then, the knife still in her hand, the right. She stood like that, cried out, ‘O, Scarpia, avanti a Dio’, and turned away from what was meant to be her audience, arms reaching forward. Brunetti trembled with pity at the raw ugliness of the voice. Three years at the Conservatory, and this the result? Dear God, the pathos of it, and the terrible, terrible waste.
He closed his eyes at this thought, and when he opened them again he saw Flavia lurching to the side of the moving woman in what looked like an attempt to avoid the knife. Panicked feet seeking purchase on the narrow rampart, Flavia appeared to lose her balance, her arm passing dangerously close to the other woman’s face. Stunned, she let go of the knife, and when she saw it fall, leaned forward to catch it; the thrust of her movement, added to her weight, sent her to the edge of the false wall. Her foot tripped over it and she toppled over. Brunetti stood up, listening for the sound of her flopping on to the mattresses into which Flavia had been falling for two weeks.
Instead, after what seemed a long silence but could have been no more than a few seconds, he heard a heavy thud from well below where he could see Flavia.
Flavia stood on the wall, staring straight ahead, and then she lowered herself to the edge of the parapet and put her head between her knees. He heard footsteps running across the stage, but he ignored them and climbed the remaining steps.
He ran across the platform to her and went down on one knee. ‘Flavia, Flavia,’ he said, careful not to touch her. ‘Flavia, are you all right?’ Her shoulders heaved as she dragged breath into her lungs and shoved it out, her hands crossed over and pushing at her chest. He saw the blood running down the back of her right hand. The cut looked deep enough to leave a scar, he thought, then marvelled that he could think of such a thing at such a time.
‘Flavia, are you all right?’ – hoping there were no other cuts. ‘Flavia, I’m going to put my hand on your shoulder. All right?’
He thought she nodded. He placed his hand on her, held it there, as if to give her some contact with the rest of the world. She nodded again, and gradually her breathing slowed, but still she did not look up.
Hearing Vianello come up to them he said, ‘Call them, then go down and take a look at her.’
‘I already did,’ the Inspector said. ‘She’s dead.’
When she heard that, Flavia raised her head and looked at Brunetti. It was only then that he remembered the young man with the key, smiling at Flavia and saying he’d lower the platform with the Styrofoam panels because she hated it so much.
Behind him, he heard Vianello move off and start to make a phone call.
He removed his hand from her shoulder, and he saw her register the gesture. ‘She told me she knew where my children live,’ Flavia said.
He got to his feet and stood looking down at her. Then he put his hands under her arm and helped her to her feet.
‘Come on, we’ll walk you home,’ Brunetti said.
Table of Contents
Falling in Love
Also by Donna Leon
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
/> Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
