But today’s article…now, this was news.
“Italian basso Massimo Luca,” the article ran, “has withdrawn from La Scala’s production of Don Giovanni, starring American soprano Octavia Voss.”
Must they work that woman’s name into every article? And what was with Luca?
“The young bass could not be reached for comment, but a spokesman for the company said he had gone to a pronto soccorso after his last performance, and was hospitalized with exhaustion and possible anemia. His understudy, Pietro Ricci, will—”
Domenico laid the newspaper aside and picked up his coffee cup. Ignoring the plate of prosciutto and melon and croissants waiting for him, he found the television remote and clicked it on. He hoped to hear more news of what had happened to Massimo Luca, but he could make no sense out of the Italian newscaster. He flipped channels, looking for the BBC, but there was nothing but a subtitled comedy. He turned it off and went back to his breakfast tray.
This meant something. He knew it in his bones. He just had to figure out what it was.
He would eat and shower. And then he would find out what hospital Luca was in. He wanted to know.
32
Ah, dimmi un poco dove possiamo trovarlo.
Ah, just tell me where we can find him.
—Masetto, Act Two, Scene One, Don Giovanni
Octavia ordered a taxi the moment she heard the news, although she dreaded the look she must see in Massimo’s eyes. She presented herself at the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli at the earliest possible visiting hour. She wore her trench coat slung hastily over jeans and a sweater, an Hermès scarf wound carelessly around her neck and her hair pulled back in a clip.
She was empty-handed, knowing flowers were hypocritical. It was her fault he was there. No gift or gesture could change that. He would have questions. She didn’t know, as yet, how she would answer them, but she meant to try.
In the cab, she tormented herself with self-reproach. When she walked in through the main doors of the hospital and asked for his room, she could barely look into the eyes of the receptionist. She rode up in a sterile-looking elevator and walked down corridors marked with terrifying words: Radiografia and Chirurgia and Oncologia. They were words she had never had to confront. She had never been hospitalized in all of her long life.
She found Massimo’s room in a quiet corner of the floor. It was dim and quiet inside. The door was half open, and only a curtain blocked the view of the bed. The smells of alcohol and disinfectant fought with the dull smell of floor wax in the corridor.
Octavia paused for a moment in the doorway, listening to the silence. It seemed Massimo was alone, a small blessing. If his family had been there, she would have had to turn and leave without a word.
Quietly, she slipped in through the door and closed it behind her with a small click. There was almost no light in the room now, and she waited for a moment for her eyes to adjust to the shadows. When she could see again, she put a hand on the curtain and gingerly pulled it aside. Its plastic rings rattled softly against their pole as she drew it closed again and turned to the bed.
He lay quietly, his eyes closed, his hair very dark against the bleached white of the thin hospital pillow. An IV tube ran from an elevated bottle into a needle taped to his hand, which lay limp and unmoving on a beige blanket. His chest barely moved. His legs were too long for the bed, and his bare feet stuck out beyond the blanket, his toes propped against the metal footboard. He looked unbearably young, and thin, and ill.
Octavia stepped close to the bed, and bent over him. “Massimo,” she said softly. “Massimo, dear. It’s I. It’s Octavia.”
Immediately, startlingly, his eyes opened. The caramel color darkened to milk chocolate in the bad light. The whites were bloodshot. He stared at her as if he had never seen her before.
She said, with a dry mouth, “Massimo. Do you know me?”
And in an eerie echo of the words of the now-dead street girl, he said hoarsely, “Octavia. What did you do? What was that?”
She hesitated, touching his hand with her fingers. His smooth skin was so cold it frightened her. The doctors would have infused him immediately, of course. Now it looked as if they were hydrating him. He would recover, but he looked so weak. She meant to tell him everything, as soon as she could, but…would the shock be too much, at this moment? Days would pass before he believed her, and even then, not until the thirst overtook him would he truly understand.
And now he had withdrawn from the production. It was in the news. Zdenka Milosch would know what had happened. La Società would know. Massimo was in danger.
Before these thoughts finished whirling through her mind, while Massimo’s eyes were still fixed on hers with that shocked stare, the door to the room opened, its rubber seal hissing on the gray linoleum.
Octavia stiffened, and the back of her neck prickled. It was very soon for Zdenka to have sent someone, but the elders were nothing if not thorough. She turned, putting her back to Massimo, placing herself between him and the door. She would not allow it. She simply would not allow it, even if it meant her own death.
The curtain slid back, slowly. Octavia tensed in readiness.
When he came forward, relief made her knees go weak, and she sagged against Massimo’s bed. “Nick! For God’s sake, what are you doing here?”
Nick Barrett-Jones stopped where he was, one hand still on the curtain. His eyes narrowed as he recognized her. He held a spray of flowers, the kind available for purchase in hospital gift shops, in his other hand. “Octavia,” he said sourly. “Do you think you’re the only one concerned for our young colleague?”
And behind her, Octavia heard Massimo repeat, “What was that? What did you do?”
Nick’s eyes blazed with a sudden, avid curiosity. “What did he say?”
Octavia turned quickly to bend over Massimo, to take his free hand, the one not tethered to the bottle of saline solution. She squeezed it, willing him not to speak again, not to let Nick hear that damning question. His eyes on hers lost their focus, and the lids fell, slowly, inexorably, until his eyes were closed. He slept again, his features softening, smoothing, looking unbearably vulnerable.
Octavia, with an aching heart, laid Massimo’s hand gently on the blanket and stepped back. She spoke over her shoulder. “He’s sleeping, Nick. We’d better let him rest, don’t you think?” She turned and reached for the ridiculous bouquet. “Why don’t we find some water for these?”
She put her hand under Nick’s elbow and steered him toward the door, much as she had steered him around the set when he forgot his blocking. She felt the resistance in his muscles, but her fingers were hard on his arm.
They reached the corridor just in time to see a little knot of people approaching. A nurse was with them, speaking quietly. When she saw Nick and Octavia, she frowned. “Solo famiglia,” she said sternly. She pointed to a sign on the door.
“Mi dispiace,” Octavia murmured. Nick looked resentful, but he didn’t argue as she handed his flowers to the nurse, then guided him down the long hallway toward the elevator.
In the lobby they found that other singers had arrived, with Giorgio and Russell. Russell gave a little nervous cry when he saw Octavia, and came to rest his trembling hand in hers. The tip of his nose was scarlet, as if he had been weeping. One of the artists’ liaisons was there, bearing a mass of roses and a card already signed by members of both casts. Octavia saw her dinner hostess of several weeks earlier hurry through the lobby, a worried look on her face. The opera people stood about, murmuring together, wondering at how the young bass could have fallen soill. There was talk about pickup rehearsals and understudies.
Octavia learned from someone who had spoken to a doctor that Massimo would be hospitalized for at least three days. The general assumption, it seemed, was that he had been hiding an illness. There were whispers of a curse on the production. Octavia could only hope that three days in a hospital room under constant supervision would keep Massimo safe for the time be
ing. She drew Russell aside and said, “Russell, do you think I’ll be needed for the pickup rehearsal? I have business out of town.”
He shook his head. “It will be Marie, mostly.”
“Thank you. I’ll be back in two days,” she said. “And I’ll be calling to check on Massimo’s progress.”
After a word to Giorgio, she slipped out of a side door of the hospital and flagged a taxi. At Il Principe she threw a few clothes in an overnight case, with the minimum of toiletries she needed for a short trip. She let the front desk know she would be away for a couple of days, and they called the limousine to take her to Malpensa. The clerk offered to arrange her air tickets, but Octavia said she would do it at the airport. She didn’t want to leave a trail. She didn’t intend anyone to know where she was going.
Octavia took a window seat in the business-class compartment. Tense and unhappy, she stared out the window of the Czech Airlines flight at the distant earth spinning beneath the wing of the Airbus, and reflected on the strangeness of leaving Malpensa at six in the evening to arrive in Prague ninety minutes later.
Teresa’s first trip to Prague, as a young singer traveling from Milan to join the Bondini theater company, had meant nearly two weeks spent in coaches and roadside inns.
For Hélène, it had been a journey of two days. She and Ugo had taken the train from Paris, with lengthy stops in Nancy and Munich. By the time they arrived at Hlavní Nádraí the station in Prague, Hélène felt as if the cinders from the locomotive had permeated her clothes and saturated her hair.
It was called the Franz Josef Station in 1907, a towering art nouveau complex, still under construction. The noise of the builders and the bustle of travelers grated on Hélène’s nerves. She was tired and dirty and anxious. The scents of frying food from the vendors that crowded the station turned her stomach.
No one was on the platform to meet them.
Ugo merely shrugged at that. “When you see what it’s like, you’ll understand,” he said.
Hélène had little choice but to follow him as he worked his way through the crowd to a set of stairs leading down into a dim tunnel and on to the main hall on the ground level. The atmosphere in the hall was a bit more orderly. A line of hacks waited outside in the street. As Ugo negotiated with one of the drivers, Hélène looked to her left, where she remembered the Horse Gate set into the city walls. She didn’t recognize the silhouettes of the buildings that had been erected in her long absence. A huge neo-Renaissance structure dominated the skyline, and she supposed there was nothing left of the Horse Market.
Ugo called her name, and she allowed herself to be handed into a hack, settled with a blanket around her legs. She pulled her traveling hat firmly onto her head.
Ugo asked, “Are you comfortable?”
She nodded but turned her face away, to watch the changed face of the city roll by.
She was not yet certain of Ugo, and not sure she trusted him, though they had traveled in company for more than a year now, since the day of the earthquake.
She had, in fact, tried to leave him in Golden Gate Park, to go back to the Palace Hotel for her things.
The park had become a place of madness. A makeshift hospital had been set up near one of the entrances, with the ill and dying who had been moved from the nearby Mechanics’ Pavilion lying on pallets on the grass. Families were collapsed around heaps of their belongings, all they could carry. Already soldiers were organizing lines for food and water. Hélène averted her eyes from those huddled, weeping over their losses.
She made her way out through the Page Street Gate, hurrying down the hill toward Market Street. The streets were full of smoke, and ominous flames shot up before her, obscuring the eastern horizon. She couldn’t think what else to do but press on, though she was jostled by running people, her ears assaulted by the clanging of fire bells and the shouts of men struggling to put out fires here and there. As she struggled down Market, the smoke thickened. The road was a mess of jumbled paving stones. To her left she saw that only the framework was left of the dome of City Hall. On her right, the Post Office and the Mint were ablaze. The Emporium and the Flood Building had vanished as if they had never been built. Everywhere people struggled to get away from the business district, their eyes blank with shock, their faces smudged with soot and tears and blood.
It looked to Hélène, as she pressed on, that virtually everything south of Market had toppled, brick walls smashed, wooden buildings turned to splinters. Plaster dust clogged the air, and she pressed her sleeve to her mouth, trying to filter out the worst of it. She turned right on Second, her heart quailing in her breast, expecting to see that the Palace Hotel had suffered the fate of so many other buildings.
A spurt of hope filled her when she saw through the smoke that the flag still flew from the roof of the Palace. Jets of water played around it, the first sign of hope she had found. As she stood below, gazing up at this wonder, a man at her elbow said, “You should get away from here, miss. It’s going to burn.”
“But the water!” she said, pointing up at the bright streams arcing through billows of smoke from nearby fires.
As she stood looking up at the elegant façade of the hotel, the jets faltered and died. Moments afterward the fire, which had been growing inside the two-foot-thick walls, exploded through the roof. Hélène stood helplessly in the street, watching the fire blossom and burst through the many floors of the Palace Hotel. The last thing to burn, consumed by flames running up its supporting pole, was the American flag flying above the devastation.
Hélène stood where she was for long minutes, unable to think what to do next. Everything she owned had been in her room at the hotel—her money, her clothes, her scores. The little garnet brooch, Vincenzo dal Prato’s gift, was the last remnant of Teresa Saporiti’s life, and the only one she had dared to keep.
Hélène wept sooty tears and watched in stunned amazement as the hotel collapsed on itself, shooting clouds of ash into the already-fouled air of the city.
She was hardly aware when Ugo appeared silently beside her, took her arm, and led her gently away. She found herself on Market Street before she regained her composure. When she did, she pulled free of Ugo’s grip. “I have to go to the opera house,” she said. “Perhaps they’ll pay me, at least for last night.”
“No,” Ugo said. “The building is gutted. They lost all the sets, all the costumes, and the manager is nowhere to be found.”
She couldn’t take it in. “How do you know that?”
“Hélène,” he said. “We need to get out of the city. There won’t be enough food or water. There won’t be anyplace safe to sleep. We have to go.”
It seemed to her the city was dying around her. People jammed the streets, hoping to gain passage on one of the ferries. Children, separated from their parents, wailed until kind strangers picked them up and held them. Charred and smashed bodies were stacked like firelogs at street corners, with an occasional weeping survivor lifting their heads, scanning their faces in dread. Hélène had seen a great deal of death, of course. But the magnitude of the losses in San Francisco was numbing even to her, who was already inured.
Though she didn’t want to, she walked away with Ugo. His arm was around her back, and his steps were steady and purposeful. She went where he directed, feeling as if she had lost her own will. She was like one of those lost children, wandering aimlessly about, waiting for someone to choose a direction.
Ugo led her through the death and confusion to the Pacific Mail dock, where a paddle steamer was being loaded with patients and nurses from St. Mary’s Hospital. Through some means of persuasion Hélène never understood, Ugo secured space on the Medoc for them, and within the hour they were steaming out into the safety of the bay, surrounded by one hundred seventy seriously ill patients and a handful of Sisters of Mercy in their black habits, their white coifs spattered with ash.
The decks were jammed with pallets. Some patients lay two to a bed. At one end of the steamer, the dead and dy
ing had their own area. At the other end, the Sisters of Mercy were busy tending to those were ill, but who might survive. Ugo left Hélène in a sheltered corner and went to one of the nuns. She saw him bob his head, make a gesture, say something. In a short time he was carrying bedpans, spreading blankets, bringing bandages and medicines to the sisters and the two doctors they had with them.
Hélène, ashamed of her lassitude, rose and went to offer her own services, and she and Ugo worked side by side, in complement with the Sisters of Mercy, until the steamer reached Oakland. The sisters prayed ceaselessly, a comforting chant beneath the slap of the paddle wheel and the groans of the ill and injured. Hélène, with her hands full of noisome basins or fouled bandages, found herself praying with them, automatically reciting the beautiful old verse, Hail Mary, full of grace… as if she were still allowed to practice her faith.
When the steamer docked in Oakland in the early morning hours, they said farewell and prepared to disembark. One of the sisters reached out a hand to touch Hélène’s forehead in blessing. Hélène, realizing at the last minute what she was about to do, jerked away. She feared that even the lightest touch of those sanctified fingers might burn her skin. The nursing sister dropped her hand. She said nothing, but only turned away, too weary even to be offended.
Hélène was exhausted beyond imagining, and she thought Ugo must be the same. Neither had slept for two nights. Hélène couldn’t think, couldn’t plan, could barely put one foot in front of the other.
Ugo, though, seemed to have deep resources of strength and energy. He helped her off the Medoc and walked with her to the Oakland train station. Though the station was crowded with refugees, he arranged something, and before the day was out, the two of them boarded a Southern Pacific train that would make connections to New York. As it chugged out of Oakland, Hélène collapsed onto a padded bench seat in a blissfully quiet compartment, listening to the soporific rhythm of the wheels against the rails. She gazed across at Ugo, this slender, capable man who had suddenly become part of her life. She had not given him permission to travel with her, nor had he asked for it. But it was clear he meant to stay at her side.
Mozart’s Blood Page 31
