The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  A droning sound passed high above him—his sense of present time and place flooded back. Looking up, he saw the sinking lights of the airplane pass out of sight behind the faintly lit mass of the opera-house wall rising above him.

  And before him on the ground lay a man not dead but dying; quick exploration revealed a crepitation of bone shards under the skin of the temple where Weyland’s fist had crushed the skull. Apart from one smudge on the throat, there was no blood. He crouched in panic above the dying man. He had struck without need, without hunger. From this man dressed as in an earlier time—costumed, rather, a performer in the opera surely—he had been in no danger.

  He was in danger now. This kill must be disguised.

  He rose and crossed the road. The hillside dropped steeply toward the brush-choked arroyo below. A man might fall—but not far enough or hard enough to smash his head in. Also, he could see a fence partway down which would break such a fall.

  He looked back up at the opera house itself, which crested the hill like a vessel breaking forward from a deep wave. The south side reared up three stories over the roadway into a knife-sharp corner like a ship’s prow against the night sky. From its deck a man might drop and crack his skull here below. And where the hillside sloped up to meet the north end of the opera-house deck, one might mount that deck as if stepping aboard from the surface of the sea.

  Weyland shouldered his victim, ran along the road, and scrambled up the stony hillside onto the deck. Then he turned and, bending as low as he might with his burden, sprinted down the deck toward the high southern prow.

  * * *

  A woman in the balcony focused her glasses on Scarpia. Now that he had wrung from Tosca assent to her own rape, he was deceitfully arranging Cavaradossi’s supposedly mock execution in exchange. This was worth coming all the way from Buffalo. Scarpia was such a nasty brute, but so virile—better than Telly Savalas.

  * * *

  The assistant technical director, crossing behind the stage with some cables to be returned to the patch room in the north wings, was too close to the music to hear the faint susurration of movement out on the deck below. He was absorbed in checking for production people who might be lounging on the back stairs, making noise—but tonight there was no one.

  Outside the patch room, for an instant he thought he saw someone sitting in the corner with drooping head. It was only the dummy, supposedly the corpse of Angelotti who had killed himself rather than be recaptured. The soldiers would hang up the “body” at the start of the last act, a bit of business special to this production. People needed something to watch during that long, delicate opening.

  Every night of Tosca the assistant technical director saw the dummy slumped there, and each time for a second he thought it was real.

  * * *

  Weyland flung himself down with his victim on the veranda outside the costume shop. The windows of the shop were yellow with light but largely blocked by set materials stacked outside. He could hear no sound of footsteps or voices on the terrace above the veranda.

  He rested his forehead against the low concrete rampart, pressing his sleeve against his mouth to muffle the rasp of his own breathing. His back and arms burned with strain, and a cramp gripped at his gut.

  How long before the second act ended? Once again the music was quiet and conversational. Weyland could hear Scarpia gallantly agreeing to write the safe-conduct that Tosca demanded for herself and her lover before she would actually yield her body. A dirge-like melody began. It was not loud; Weyland hoped it would cover whatever noise he made back here.

  The dying man was heavy with the quicksilver weight of unconscious people, as if any shift could send all his substance running instantly into one part of his body. Weyland hefted him by the arms against the low parapet. The man groaned, his head rolled on Weyland’s shoulder, and one of his hands plucked aimlessly at Weyland’s knee.

  Looking down past him, Weyland decided: there, between those heaped-up masses of rubbish, where the paving came right to the foot of the wall—a fall, he judged, of some thirty feet. Not a lot, but enough to be plausible.

  Now, under the sobbing lamentation of the music, he rolled the man’s upper body out along the rampart, bent and heaved the legs up—the man dropped. There came only a dull sound of impact from below.

  No shout was raised, but during a performance, uncertain of what had been glimpsed in the dark, no one backstage would call out. They would simply arrive—and if Weyland had not been seen yet, he might be at any moment, for he had been aware of someone moving on the stage level above during his dash along the deck. He had to get off the deck at once. For fear of being seen, he didn’t dare run the length of the deck again to reach the low end. And he couldn’t risk trying to find his way out through the backstage area in the midst of the performance.

  He looked over the rampart once more. Out of the piled-up theater trash below and to his left there thrust, end on, a huge structure made of two thick sheets of plywood joined by two-by-four braces, like the steps of a crooked ladder. Farther down was some sort of platform, warped and buckled, and—stage trees? He could make out sausagelike branches with bristling ends.

  If he hung from the rampart at the full stretch of his arms, his rubber shoe soles would reach within perhaps five feet of the braced structure. And if the whole twisted heap didn’t collapse under him when he landed on it, he might climb down.

  Taking no more time for thought or fear, he lowered himself over the rampart and let go his hold, crouching as he dropped to grab at the pale wooden ribs below. His landing was unexpectedly solid and jarring; whether there was noise or not he couldn’t tell, because suddenly the music burst into a thundering crescendo. He began to clamber down the crossed wooden struts.

  The whole pile leaned and creaked and shifted obscurely beneath him. He smelled dust. Under the blaring music he was keenly aware of his heart pounding, his gasping breath, and somewhere below the cracking of wood. He caught hold of one of the spiny trees, which dipped drunkenly under his weight, and he let go and slithered down in a rush, fetching up breathless on all fours on the asphalt.

  Hurriedly, he examined his victim. The skull was pulped, the man was dead. Weyland looked up: the circumstances would certainly suggest that the unlucky fellow had fallen from the veranda or the balcony above.

  Still no sounds of alarm or investigation. The stormy music was dying away into falling tremolo chords under the soprano’s furious shouts—Die! Die! Weyland listened to the deep sighs of the strings while his heartbeat slowed and the sweat of fear and effort dried on him. He was as safe as he could make himself. Even if murder were suspected, who would connect this dead performer and an Eastern professor, total strangers to each other?

  He turned away without looking at the body again—it no longer concerned him—and walked back up toward the parking area. Just beyond the reach of the parking-lot lights he stooped to brush the dust from his clothing, in the course of which he struck his own knee a painful blow; his hands would not obey him with their customary precision.

  The numbers on his watch face jiggled slightly with the tremor in his wrist: 10:40. Surely the second act would end soon and he could return to mingle with the crowd before the final act.

  At last he allowed himself the question: what had happened to him? That blow was his oldest way: it paralyzed, yet left the prey living, blood still sweet, while he fed. What had made him use that ancient method, when from these refined modern times he had learned appropriately refined ways?

  But what elation in that instant of savage release! Thinking of it now he felt his muscles tingle, and his breath came in a sharp hiss of pleasure.

  * * *

  Onstage, Scarpia lay dead. Tosca had stabbed him with a knife from his dinner table when he turned, safe-conduct in hand, to embrace her at last. To his lust-motif, inverted and muted to a sinister whisper in the strings and flutes, Tosca set a lighted candle down at each of his outflung hands. On a sudden loud chord she
dropped a carved crucifix onto his breast, and then as the snare drum rattled ominously again she snatched up her cloak and gloves and ran for her life. The dead man was left alone on the stage for the last stealthy, menacing bars of Act Two.

  The lights blinked out, applause crashed like surf. Two stagehands in black ran from the wings to stand in front of Scarpia—Marwitz, the baritone—while in his pale costume he rose and slipped down through the trapdoor.

  Marwitz hurried away to find Rosemary Ridgeway, his young Tosca. His chest was full of the champagne feeling that meant success. He had been in this business for a long time, and he knew what “perfect” meant: that somehow the inevitable errors had been knit into a progression of actions so rich and right that everything fused into a vivid, indivisible experience never to be forgotten—or duplicated.

  He hugged Rosemary hard outside the dressing rooms. “I knew, I knew,” he chortled into her disordered hair, “because I was so nervous. I could sing Scarpia in my sleep by now, so nervous is good—it means even after so many times something is still alive, waiting to create.”

  “Were we as good as I thought we were?” she asked breathlessly.

  He shook her by the shoulders. “We were terrible, terrible, what are you saying? Pray to stay so bad!” With the jealous gods of theater thus propitiated, he made to embrace her again, but she stood back, looking into his face with sudden anxiety.

  “Oh, Kurt, are you all right? You really fell tonight when I stabbed you—I felt the stage shake.”

  “I am not so heavy,” Marwitz said with offended dignity. Then he grinned. “My foot slipped, yes, but don’t worry—you killed me very nicely, very well. They will award you two ears and a tail for it, wait and see.”

  * * *

  “I liked how the water pitcher was busted and she couldn’t wash the blood off her hands like she’s supposed to,” said a woman in gold lamé, “so she just wiped it off on Scarpia’s dinner napkin.”

  Her friend frowned. “They should call it Scarpia, not Tosca. It’s not a love story, it’s a hate story about two strong people who wipe each other out—along with a couple of poor jerks who wander into the crossfire.”

  A man in a raccoon coat shook his head vehemently. “You feel that way because this fellow played Scarpia too civilized, like an executive. He’s supposed to be just a jumped-up hoodlum. Tosca’s line about him after the torture was originally ‘The dirty cop will pay for this.’ ”

  “What is it now?” inquired the friend.

  “ ‘A just God will punish him.’ ”

  “Well, who changed the line?”

  “Puccini did.”

  “Then he must have thought the ‘dirty cop’ line made Scarpia look too much like a hoodlum: he’s meant to be smooth,” the friend declared. “Myself, I never knew a hoodlum with legs as nice as this Scarpia’s. Isn’t it a shame that men quit wearing stockings and britches?”

  The woman in gold lamé glanced around disparagingly. “No it isn’t, not with the boring hindquarters most guys got. Maybe legs were cuter in days of yore.”

  * * *

  McGrath had run into a client. He brought her a drink from the bar. She had taste: the plaster cast on her left arm was painted with a frieze of red-brown Egyptian tomb figures.

  “Personally,” McGrath said, “I think this opera’s a bunch of cheap thrills set to pretty music.”

  The client, who had bought two bronzes from the gallery this year, reacted critically. “Other people do, too; they honestly feel that Tosca’s just a vulgar thriller,” she observed. “I think what shocks them is seeing a woman kill a man to keep him from raping her. If a man kills somebody over politics or love, that’s high drama, but if a woman offs a rapist, that’s sordid.”

  McGrath hated smart-talking women, but he wanted her to buy another bronze; they were abstract pieces, not easy to sell. So he smiled.

  He wished he’d stayed with fine silver, turquoise, and Pueblo pottery.

  * * *

  Jean and Elmo strolled around and around the fountain in the opera-house patio.

  “Opera can really shake you up,” Elmo ventured, troubled.

  Jean nodded fervently. “Especially on a night like this, when the performers are going all out. And a responsive audience throws the excitement right back at them so it keeps on building.”

  “But why does the bad guy get such great music?”

  “Listen, Elmo, do you read science fiction? Tolkien? Fantasy stories?”

  “A little.”

  “Sometimes those stories tell about what they call wild magic—magic powers not subject to books or spells, powers you can’t really use because they’re not good or bad or anything to do with morality at all; they just are, uncontrollable and irresistible. I think this music tonight is like that—deep and strong and nothing to do with right or wrong.”

  Elmo didn’t answer. That kind of talk reminded him of his wife’s relatives over near Las Vegas, New Mexico, who sometimes reported great leaping wheels of witch-fire flying about in the mountains at night.

  * * *

  Soldiers assembled in the trap under the stage. When the third act opened, they would mount onto the platform of the Castel Sant’ Angelo, where Cavaradossi was being held for execution. The dummy of the suicide Angelotti was prepared for them to lug onstage and hang from the castle wall according to Scarpia’s Act Two orders.

  Behind the set of the platform wall, the crew chief oversaw the placement of the landing pad on which the dummy, heaved over the wall with a noose around its neck, would arrive. The pad was two stacks of mattresses roped together side by side, twenty in all to cushion the fall not of the dummy but of Tosca, when she leaped off the battlement in the end.

  * * *

  Weyland came out of the men’s room having cleaned up as thoroughly and unobtrusively as possible. At his seat down in front he put on the raincoat he had left folded there. The coat would conceal the split in the shoulder seam of his jacket and any stains or rips he might have missed.

  Both terror and exhilaration had left him. He was overcome by lethargy, but he no longer felt ill; his hunting frenzy had burned all that away. A mood of grim pleasure filled him. It was good to know that living among soft people in a soft time had not weakened him; that adapting enough to pass for one of them had not damaged his essential lionlike, night-hunter nature. Even a flagrant misstep need not be fatal, for his ancient cunning and ferocity had not deserted him. He felt restored.

  These thoughts passed and sank, leaving him spent and peaceful.

  * * *

  Rosemary Ridgeway took off the brunette wig, rumpled from her scuffle with Scarpia, and set it on its Styrofoam head to be combed out afresh. How absurd to try to become the libretto’s dark beauty of whom Cavaradossi had sung so meltingly in the first act: “Tosca ha l’occhio nero.” Rosemary’s eyes were blue, and she couldn’t tolerate contact lenses to change them. On the other hand, she didn’t quite have the nerve—or the force and reputation—to emulate the great Jeritza who, libretto be damned, had played the role blonde.

  Rosemary knew she was young to sing Tosca. Yet tonight her voice had acquired maturity and control, as if all of Marwitz’s encouragement and advice had suddenly begun to work at once. If only the miracle would last until the end!

  She sat gathering strength for the final act and scratching at her scalp, which already itched in anticipation of the beastly brown wig.

  * * *

  Just before the house lights went down, the woman in snakeskin glanced nervously at the man beside her. She had hoped that he wouldn’t return; he’d been so caught up in the second act that he’d scared her. You were supposed to appreciate the opera, not join in.

  Now he seemed freed of his earlier agitation, and she saw with surprise that he was really a fine-looking man, with the strong, springing profile of an explorer, or an emperor on an ancient coin. Though he did not appear what she would call old, maturity had scored his cheeks and forehead, and he sat as if p
ressed under a weight of long thought.

  He seemed not to notice her covert scrutiny. The curve of his upturned coat collar was like a symbolic shield, signaling a wish to be left alone.

  She hesitated. Then it was too late for a conversational gambit; the last act had begun.

  * * *

  A horn called. Slowly, to the lighting-board operator’s counts in the booth, the lights grew infinitesimally stronger, simulating the approach of a Roman dawn over the Castel Sant’ Angelo.

  Usually, once the Angelotti dummy had been flung over the wall and disposed of, the assistant technical director and his stagehand companion would stretch out on the mattresses and doze. The sound of shots—the firing squad executing Cavaradossi—would rouse them for the flying arrival of Tosca, leaping to her death.

  Tonight these two technicians stayed awake and listened.

  * * *

  Tosca recounted to her condemned lover Cavaradossi the events that had led to her stabbing of Scarpia. At the swift reprise of the murder music, the woman in snakeskin felt the man beside her stir in his seat. But he didn’t leap up and bolt this time. A sensitive soul, she thought, observing that he listened with closed eyes as if he wanted nothing to distract him from the music; perhaps a musician himself, a pianist or a violinist? She looked at his fine, long-fingered hands.

  Holding Tosca’s hands in his, Cavaradossi sang in a caressing tone, O sweet, pure hands that have dealt a just, victorious death . . .

  * * *

  Elmo, appalled, felt tears run down his cheeks. He didn’t dare blot them for fear of calling attention to them. The doomed lovers were so sure the execution would be make-believe and then they would escape together. They sang with such tender feeling for each other, so much hope and joy.

  How frightening his tears, how strange the pleasure of his tears.