Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  “You can’t seriously believe Consuela stabbed Marsan in mistake for Belaggio,” said Hannibal in a pained voice as the young Sicilian urged his friend away. “Not that she couldn’t undertake a very competent murder, you understand. But dark or not, in that alley it’s not a mistake she would make. Besides, I happen to know Madame Montero—er—couldn’t have murdered anyone last night.”

  “Querida . . .” Madame paused on the stairs, looking back expectantly at Hannibal.

  Hannibal said, “Excuse me,” with dignity, and went to join her. Presumably, thought January as they ascended the stair together and the dressing-room door shut behind them, to unlace her. . . .

  That’s all we need to complicate matters.

  “Myself,” declared Tiberio, popping through one of the volcano’s craters again and resting an elbow on a garishly painted lava-flow, “I do not think anything was touched because I was here until all were gone. They are thieves, you understand, these schifui Americanese. They would run off with the gunpowder, and the silk to make the effects of fire and lava and smoke. So I make it my business to remain until all are gone, and then to check where everything is before I leave. And it is all as it was, believe me.”

  “No, no, my dear,” wailed Herr Smith’s despairing voice from the rehearsal-room door. “One applies the hand passionately to the forehead, then step back on the right foot, with the body quite backward. Both hands up denotes Astonishment rather than Anguish. . . .”

  “So you saw Belaggio leave?” January bent and stretched each finger of his swollen hands.

  “I did, Signor. It was just before eleven. He said he had been back and forth many times to the hotel in search of the bella signorina; he would return there, he said, to await her.”

  “Was he angry?” asked January. “Jealous?”

  “No, Signor. Only afraid that things would become complicated for the opera, you understand.” The Sicilian cocked a dark, knowing eye at him, like a parrot. “Whatever she told him after this nonsense of the duel, he believed. She is good, La bella d’Isola.”

  “I brought your things, Uncle Ben.” Gabriel appeared beside him, panting from his dash through the streets. He had January’s black longtailed woolen coat over his arm, a shirt of clean linen, cream-colored waistcoat, trousers, and a neck-cloth. “Are you all right? Mama says you were in some kind of trouble last night.”

  “I’ll be fine.” January got to his feet. In spite of a night spent in a mule barn and a day of riding around the countryside with little to eat—in spite of Big Lou and all the patrollers in the world—the quick, controlled bustle of the backstage preparations was beginning to have its usual effect on him. A sort of electric humming tingled behind his breastbone. A kind of anxiety mingled with delight, like a child in a very good dream, in that moment just before the fairies appear.

  Like the far-off drumming of hooves, the murmur of the crowd in front began to wash over him, cleansing away any consideration beyond that of the music: the joy of doing a wonderful thing wonderfully.

  He scrubbed his hand playfully over Gabriel’s close-cropped hair, and went to change his clothes.

  Filing into the orchestra pit behind the Bratizant brothers and a rather rumpled Hannibal, January scanned the boxes as usual, wondering whether Incantobelli would be there. He saw Henri Viellard immediately, solicitous in handing his mother into her chair before turning his attention to that porcelain doll at his side. Was Dominique, January wondered, in the latticed loges of the plaçées, waiting as all the ladies of Rampart Street learned to wait?

  The heart is stronger than the head . . . He saw d’Isola’s eyes in the light of the flaring cressets of the market-place, heard the passion in her voice as she turned her face away. I do not want to listen to this. . . .

  O my beautiful one, my adored . . .

  What about the woman Liane? Had anyone thought to tell her? Or was she still waiting for Marsan to arrive, looking across at the gaping black square of his empty box? She tried to kill herself last year, Dominique had said.

  And like a dim echo behind his sister’s voice, the butler Jules: I always knew there’d be trouble. . . .

  And what else? January’s tired mind groped at the other words someone had said, somewhere—he thought—on the Bayou des Familles. Something that had alerted him, or would have alerted him if he hadn’t been worried about slave-stealers and patrols and d’Isola. . . .

  Alerted him to what?

  He shifted the rag around his hand, wrung out this time in hot water begged from the coffee-makers in the lobby.

  Three women tonight, he thought, who must seek another protector. Four, if you counted the girl Jocelyn.

  Madame Viellard leaned across to ask her son a question, gestured with her moss-colored satin fan at the empty box. Turned to Madame Mayerling in the box on the other side, passing the gossip along. Candles flared in the second-tier box above the Mayerlings: a servant kindling girandoles on the partition. A small, stout form took the chair by the rail, solitary and anonymous in dark evening-dress and the black domino mask of Carnival. But January recognized at once, even at the distance, the grizzled curly hair, the double watch-chain with its three gold fobs.

  “What’s Davis doing here?” whispered Hannibal.

  January shook his head.

  Then Belaggio’s solid black shape blocked his view, stepping up to the conductor’s box. January’s mind grabbed for the opening onslaught and dropped into the blood-and-thunder pyrotechnics of the overture as if he’d fallen overboard from a steamboat, to be carried away on the Mississippi’s implacable tide.

  By the time Act One concluded, January’s hands felt like he’d caught them in a cotton-press. He bribed Hannibal to take the piano during the entr’acte ballet, and retreated to the wings and his half-melted packets of ice. It was there that one of the boys who hawked candy along the boxes found him, with a note—“From the gentleman in Box Twenty-six, sir.”

  Meet me, it said.

  Of course, from the boxes John Davis would have seen him leave.

  A catwalk ran above the backstage and through the flies to the demi-porte that led to the corridor behind the second-tier boxes. Davis met him there above the tangle of arbors and statuary, bollards and nets and cottage-fronts coming and going. Half covered by the music of the ballet, the backstage clamor rose up with the gasolier heat around them: hidalgos and grand ladies scrambling to shed ruffs and farthingales and don the coarse skirts and leather jerkins of the fishing population. Higher still, the third-tier boxes and the galleries would be worse.

  The black and white of Davis’s clothing was barely to be made out in the swaying shadows of suspended rope and canvas, sandbags and pulleys and wires. On the other side of the door, the voices of the boxholders could be dimly heard, instructing footmen or maids to fetch this or that from the lobby: coffee, champagne, ices, fresh decks of cards.

  “What happened last night?” In such upside-down light as filtered from between the flies, the theater owner looked terrible, his face sunken and lined and at the same time puffy around the eyes.

  January said, “Sir, are you all right?” and Davis gestured him impatiently back.

  “It’s nothing. Is it true what I’ve heard? That Marsan was murdered in mistake for Belaggio?”

  “That’s what it looks like, sir, yes. Were you . . . ?”

  “One of my dealers told me late this afternoon that someone was in the gambling-rooms asking the servants about where I was last night. Later that City Guard, that American Shaw, came by, and asked me the same thing. What have you found out?”

  “Not a great deal, sir. Someone set a trap yesterday, I think, for Drusilla d’Isola—to keep her from performing tonight. . . .”

  “And here I thought there were no true opera-lovers in this town! My God, my Princess Elvira can sing rings around that girl! And of course no one’s going to be there to see her do it.”

  “I got here too late to have a look at the alley where the body wa
s found. And of course with all the carriages and horses going back and forth all morning, there wouldn’t have been much to see. Hannibal’s still trying to find information about the two men who attacked Belaggio before, but if they were the ones who did the murder, my guess is they’re already out of town. Weren’t you in your gambling-rooms last night?”

  “Not after eleven,” Davis said. “I wasn’t well—I haven’t been, you know. . . . Damn!” he added, shaking his head like a goaded bull. “It’s enough to turn you into a debauchee! You go home quietly and go to bed like a Christian, and how can you prove that?”

  “Do you have a man?” Davis’s wife had died the previous year; though January had heard he had a mistress, or had had one, Davis’s concern now told him the woman— if there was one these days—hadn’t been with him last night.

  If he were feeling poorly, she wouldn’t have been, of course.

  “It’s Carnival, Ben. My valet knows I’m usually not home until two or three. God only knows where he was— not where he was supposed to be, that’s for sure. And in any case,” he added, a wry expression twisting his tired mouth, “you know his testimony wouldn’t be admissible, if it came to that.”

  “Testimony?” January shied from the word. “You don’t think . . . ? It’s ridiculous. That you’d actually murder a man, or contemplate murdering him, because he robbed you of a premiere?”

  “Ben.” The stray glow of the gaslight showed up how deep the lines were in Davis’s face, how dark the liver-spots on cheek and jaw against the unhealthy pallor of the skin. “Men kill each other every day in this town over whores’ smiles. Over two-dollar poker pots. Over the personal habits of Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis the Eighteenth, and both of them have been dead for years! Lorenzo Belaggio insulted my theater, called me mediocre in public newspapers, cut me publicly in front of half the Americans in New Orleans at Trulove’s party, and suggested—also publicly—that I’m jealous enough to hire men to beat him up in an alley. Do you think there are twelve men in this town who’ll believe that isn’t grounds for assassination?”

  January was silent. He could hear the ballet—a saucy Mozart piece—winding to its final movement. It was time to go.

  “Ben, they’re asking. That means the obvious people— like Belaggio himself—have already been eliminated.” Davis reached into the front of his coat, brought out a small leather bag that clinked softly of silver as he held it out. “Use this to find out what you can,” he said. “And keep the rest.” He clapped January lightly on the arm. “Do what you can for me, all right?”

  Following the mute Fenella’s laboriously coy Act Two recapitulation of her rape, her brother Masaniello’s outrage, the vows of comradeship, rebellion, and revenge and a few preliminary rumbles and sputters from Mount Vesuvius, January re-emerged from the score to look up at Box Twenty-six. John Davis was still there, though he had moved his chair back into the shadows. Too many people on the City Council, thought January, would be in the other boxes, for him to jeopardize his chances at a building contract by appearing weary or ill. It was at parties, at the gambling-rooms and barrooms after parties that such business truly got done. A man had to have stamina to keep in the running.

  Alone of the boxes, with their chattering trickles of guests—Creoles to Creoles, Americans to Americans— Davis’s had no company, no guests.

  More ballet, while Liam and Paddy raced to transform the beach at Portici into Princess Elvira’s drawing-room and Tiberio manipulated the counterweights in the wings, and everybody prayed that Mademoiselle Flaherty wouldn’t tangle the gauze bows of her topknot in the wires. Caldwell had picked this entr’acte—a Pleyel rondo—which January could probably have played backwards, he knew it so well; he was halfway through the rondo when La d’Isola slipped through the demi-porte and sat on the piano-bench at his side.

  “I never thanked you,” she whispered, setting between them a hot towel and one of the half-melted packets of ice. The firefly candles of the orchestra all around them showed up the gold lace mitts she’d added to her costume to cover the rope-welts on her wrists, and gave to her face the illusion of color that the less forgiving gaslight parched away. Against the immense white platter of her ruff, her head had a guillotined look, like the main course at a feast dressed in its hair and its pearls.

  “It was good of you to ride out after me the way you did. You must have known what a—what a foolish thing it was for me to go into the countryside, where men like that roam about. I feel such a fool. I was so sure I’d found a deadly plot.”

  “I think you did.” January took advantage of a violin passage to wrap the warm towel around his aching hand. “Though whether against you, or Belaggio, or Italian liberty, I’m not sure. Did Belaggio ever see the note, by the way?”

  “I don’t know. I left it where I found it, on the floor just inside the door. He’d gone out to breakfast, you see, with Mr. Caldwell and Signora Redfern.”

  She swallowed hard; January could see her eyes were swollen with weeping, under their layer of Princess Elvira’s paint.

  “Were you going to meet Marsan after the dress rehearsal?” he asked gently.

  “We . . . I . . .” Her small, scabbed finger darted quickly to intercept a tear before it tracked her make-up. “He would have known I wasn’t at rehearsal. He always did come to watch from one of the boxes.”

  “But if he didn’t for some reason, he wouldn’t know?”

  She shook her head.

  She had three acts yet to get through, thought January as he resumed his playing and she slipped away. And after that, Belaggio’s amorous demands. And she could not even weep.

  Foolish or not, as Olympe would say, she did have the bristles.

  It struck him, not for the first time, how desperately unfair the life of the demimonde was to the women who led it. To be always beautiful, to be always cheerful, to be always ready to leap into bed and perform. Or to risk that soured comparison, You’re just like my wife. . . .

  And if the man was rich, there were always women younger and less worn-down waiting to tell him how delighted they were, to be at the beck and call of a man as handsome and virile as he.

  Oh, Dominique, thought January again as the corps de ballet—those little apprentice demimondaines—scampered back to the wings and the principals took their places on the dim stage. He saw her again in his mind as she whispered, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

  Princess Elvira confronted Alfonso in anger, then fell into his arms. The ballet displayed bosom and ankle in the market-place of Naples, followed by a rush of armed supernumeraries who began the rebellion with such spirit that a number of them emerged with bloodied noses and bruised arms when the field was won. Masaniello repented in horror of the much greater quantity of stage blood that had been shed, helped Elvira and Alfonso escape, went mad, and perished in a rousing chorus of “Courons à la vengeance,” after which Fenella, with a good deal of twirling and spinning that threatened to hopelessly entangle her in her own supporting wires, flung herself from the balcony into the flaming stream of Mount Vesuvius’s red silk lava.

  One more chorus of “Amour sacré de la patrie” and The End, the volcano belching mightily center stage and La Flaherty huddling gamely behind the balustrade that hid her from view while yards of scarlet and yellow silk writhed on the gleaming wet sides of the mountain and gas-jets flared and dimmed and bathed the stage in fiery light. Roman candles and pots of colored flame burst and spurted from the main crater and a dozen lesser caldera, and smoke poured from the volcano’s every orifice, stinking to heaven of sulfur and coal.

  This was what everyone had come to the theater to see, and the applause was roof-rattling. Every Kaintuck in the pit sprang to his feet, stamped, hollered approval, and contributed wolf-like howls to the general din. Belaggio, exalted, wildly signaled for more finale, so orchestra and chorus vamped passages from “Amour sacré de la patrie” for another five minutes and Tiberio continued to roar on the thunder-drums and Mr. Russell
to work the gas-jets full-cock, with Paddy and Liam surreptitiously dumping water on everything they could reach without being seen from the front. To the last, January was convinced that the whole theater would ignite, disproving, perhaps, Shaw’s theory that Davis was behind all the murder and mayhem—the man was still there in his box—but at rather high cost.

  Only when the curtain finally closed—and he heard the reassuring hiss of vast quantities of steam—did he relax. The lights went up. The orchestra rose to go. As he did so, remembering Davis’s look of drawn exhaustion, January craned his neck for a last look into Box Twenty-six to make sure the man did get up to go, in time to see the gangly shadow of Abishag Shaw step into the light, and lay a hand on John Davis’s shoulder.

  Rose was waiting for him backstage, with Gabriel, bearing a note from Olympe.

  It said, Your friend is awake.

  SIXTEEN

  “Your sister asked me already.” Madame Scie stretched a hand to touch January’s, then sank back into the worn clean linen of the pillows. “I suppose she feared I was going to be like one of those tiresome women in novels who open their eyes, gasp ‘It was . . . It was . . . the black periwinkle . . .’ and die leaving the hero to scratch his head for another four hundred pages. And I shall disappoint you, Ben, as I disappointed her. The last thing I remember is Nina lacing me up in my gold silk, which it would be too much to hope survived an assault on my person. . . .”

  “It survived,” said Olympe with her tight, close-mouthed grin, and Madame Scie sighed.

  “A spar salvaged from the wreck of an evening. Will I regret the memories I’ve lost?”

  “I fear so,” said Hannibal, who had insisted on accompanying January to Olympe’s house in spite of the fact that the performance had left him chalky and shivering. “It was opera itself. Belaggio challenged Marsan to a duel in a scatological cabaletta that rivaled Villon. Trulove had a secret assignation with the mute dancer. Lots of chorus work, lots of gorgeous supernumeraries, and one very lovely aria. You know there’s been murder done.”