Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  And, January realized, never alone.

  Had Belaggio, too, seen the Devil with a knife, waiting on a banquette in the dark?

  “. . . assumed Drusilla would go to the Young Italians of her acquaintance when she found the note,” Hannibal was saying—January pulled his attention back with an effort—“but not that she’d invite you to the picnic. Certainly not that she’d have the bottom to rent a gig herself. Were the horses ever found, by the way?”

  “Oddly enough, yes. Desdunes from the livery returned my deposit money to me yesterday, and told me that white-stockinged bay I rented had been found about a mile from Big Temple—on Bayou des Familles—” he added, seeing his friend’s eyebrows lift at this curious piece of nomenclature, “and brought back to town by Sam Pickney. And just now Cavallo said that Thunderbolt and the two horses he and Bruno rented were found grazing by the river near English Turn.”

  “Meaning whoever took them didn’t want to be seen with them in town.” Hannibal drew up his feet to let Mr. Rowe, the theater manager, pass, frantically giving instructions to Paddy about bringing up the flats for tonight’s performance of The Soldier’s Daughter. “Has it occurred to you, by the way, that if Incantobelli’s a soprano, and slight of build, he could easily have passed himself off as a woman. . . .”

  “Theoretically,” agreed January. “Have you had a close look at our Neapolitan nightingale? His nose is on the botanical order—somewhere between a large yam and a cypress-knee—and he has more lines on his face than a linen shirt straight out of the mangle. Unless that veil was thicker than a trade-goods blanket, even so unobservant a witness as Bart Gower must have commented that their employer was the ugliest woman he’d ever seen.”

  “Hmn.” Hannibal shifted again as Claud Cepovan edged closer to watch Tiberio place his firepots. He had a measuring-stick with him, of the kind undertakers used to mark the height of corpses: the cave-mouth was narrow and he’d be lucky, January thought, to make his entrance into Act Three without igniting his own cloak. “And I take it Monsieur LeMoyne didn’t think much of your tale of clandestine interviews with vanishing assassins in the wilds of the cipriere by night?”

  “He appreciated the information that he may be looking for a woman,” said January. Belaggio emerged from his office and cast a nervous glance around the backstage before emerging from beneath the gallery; when Herr Smith herded the giggling, chattering corps de ballet abruptly from the rehearsal-room, he shied as if at a gunshot.

  “He may subpoena Harry Shotwell from the Blackleg to testify to the woman’s conference with Person or Persons Unknown on the day before the original assault, which would be more useful than attempting to catch up with the Gower boys on the Natchez Trace—they’d only refuse to testify. As would Incantobelli, I suppose.” He sighed. “Danton, Robespierre, and Mirabeau did the world a great disservice—maybe Franklin and Jefferson before them. They made an ideal—be it the Restoration of Proper Order or the Rights of Man—justification for killing another human being. So we have now not only to worry about protecting ourselves from evil men, but also from good ones.”

  “Man, proud man,” sighed Hannibal, rising from his chair as the rest of the orchestra filed past toward the stage. “Drest in a little brief authority . . . like an angry ape / Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As make the angels weep.”

  “This is ridiculous!” Consuela stormed past, brandishing her copy of the score. Behind her, a hollow-eyed d’Isola nodded, smiling agreement to Belaggio’s account of which songs she must sing at the reception at the town house of Senator Soames tonight. “What do you mean, you can’t find the muskets?” wailed Mr. Rowe. “We can’t have The Soldier’s Daughter without muskets!” “Melodrama!” sneered Tiberio, and d’Isola tried not to shed a tear as the impresario kissed her hands.

  Navita de ventis, January recalled the words of the Roman Propertius: The seaman tells stories of winds, the ploughman of bulls. . . . And the soprano of the indignities of being prima or the injustices of not.

  He wondered whether there would be time between the end of rehearsal and that reception—which he was also playing at—to go to the Cabildo and speak to Davis, or to LeMoyne’s office, or to Olympe’s to see how Marguerite did.

  “Even in that,” pursued Hannibal as they took their places behind the drape of the pit, “Peter the Hermit and St. Augustine—and Mohammed, of course—are there before you. It’s one thing to die for the Rights of Man, and quite another to be hanged because someone doesn’t want the police asking questions about what Lorenzo Belaggio might have been doing at ten-thirty Thursday night. One wonders,” he added as Belaggio gave La d’Isola one final wet kiss and stepped to the podium as if he expected it to drop from beneath him like a scaffold trap, “just what the Austrians thought Marguerite knew, and might have passed along to you.”

  According to Olympe—who like most voodoos made it her business to know everything about everyone in town—Theodore Lalage, although an attorney-at-law, had refused to have anything to do with the prosecution of his sister’s murder in 1825. He had concentrated instead on the purchase of two male slaves whom he rented out by the week to the various cotton-presses in the American section of town, and the acquisition and rental of a number of houses in the Faubourg Tremé. In the ten years since the trial, this course of action had proven so profitable that Lalage had been able to sell the cottage that had belonged to their mother on Rampart Street and buy a roomier dwelling on the fashionable Rue Esplanade.

  “Which he should have taken shame on himself for doing,” declared Olympe as she cleared away the supper dishes by the light of several branches of tallow candles on the sideboards of the rear parlor. It had been a quiet meal, though January suspected ordinary conversation wouldn’t have waked Marguerite through the back bedroom’s shut door. When he’d arrived for supper, she’d greeted him drowsily, eating with good grace the blancmange and soup Gabriel had made for her, and asking about the rehearsal. She’d fallen asleep soon after, and January guessed she wouldn’t recall the conversation at all when—if—she woke.

  He followed Olympe across the darkening yard to the kitchen, carrying dishes. “He cheated his brothers and sister out of the price of the house, which Laurent, the youngest, could have stayed in after their mama’s death. The boy’s a common laborer, without the brains to make his way like the older boys. These days I’m told Theo Lalage pretends his mother wasn’t plaçée, nor his sisters, either. He tells his daughters they were dressmakers.”

  January nodded, and tried to look as if the matter were only of casual interest. His sister had her own views of justice, and would not have brought Sidonie’s brother to the notice of the white police, only to save a white man’s skin.

  Still, he had learned what he needed to know. The following morning, before his pupils arrived, he dressed in his roughest trousers and his red-and-blue calico shirt and loitered among the trees along Rue Esplanade until he saw Theo Lalage send off his slaves to their hired work. He took note of how the sturdy, gray-haired gentleman stood, in his blue coat and high-crowned beaver hat, when he talked to his bondsmen in a cold, clipped matter-of-fact voice: Don’t linger in the market on the way home. Don’t let me come past Camp Street this afternoon and see you chatting to the orange-sellers. Your labor reflects on me.

  Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

  The man himself January recognized, as he was coming to recognize most of the prominent men of the free colored community, from playing at the balls of the Faubourg Tremé Militia and Burial Society. Not a man, January guessed, who after ten years would avenge a sister he had winced to acknowledge in her life. He went home, conscious of how he now watched all the shadows of the trees behind him, and took a circuitous route. It was going to be a busy day.

  There was a final dress rehearsal for Robert le Diable at noon, added for the benefit of the dancers. Since Princess Isabella was essentially Princess Elvira in a houppelande instead of a farthingale, La d’Isola had only her usual
problems with the role and Consuela Montero was well content with a role that would allow her to display her own formidable coloratura. The eponymous Robert’s agonies concerning salvation and damnation were not notably different from Masaniello’s agonies concerning honor and liberty. The cavortings of the ghostly Abbess before the tomb of Ste. Rosalie were highly reminiscent of the cavortings of Fenella on the Portici beach. Claud Cepovan shied like a spooked virgin every time he had to spring out of the demonic cave in his seven or eight yards of flowing demonic cloak.

  And well he should, thought January. Belaggio fairly chortled over the amount of flame and smoke the cavern would generate, but January remembered the blood-soaked papers in the drawer, and the veiled woman who had said I want him corpsed. Despite Cavallo’s assurances, there was something more here than Austrian politics.

  January felt it in his bones.

  In the event, the opera went well. La d’Isola sang “Look Out Upon the Stars, My Love” and “Softly Fall the Dews of Night” as badly as she would have sung anything Monsieur Meyerbeer ever penned. During these English interludes, Madame Montero moved casually around upstage, taking the combs out of her dark hair, wrapping herself in the Princess’s shawl, and, finally, lifting her skirts to adjust a garter on her knee in a way that completely distracted d’Isola, to say nothing of its effect on the Kaintucks in the pit. Half the time the prima soprano’s back was to the audience as she sang. In Act Five the smoke-bombs misfired and instead of vanishing in a cloud of infernal fumes, the Devil Bertram was clearly seen to drop through a trap-door, which snapped closed on a corner of his cloak, leaving eighteen inches of unexplained fabric at the feet of the united lovers during their final duet.

  But at least nobody dropped dead on-stage, thought January. No one’s cloak or skirts caught fire. No wires were crossed to strangle the ghost of the dancing Abbess mid-pirouette, and no one took a shot at anyone from the gallery.

  Only at the end of the performance did January groan, when Belaggio stood on-stage and announced that “Friday’s performance of the mystical Hibernian opera, La Dame Blanche, will be conducted by the newest member of our opera season, Monsieur Arnaud Bucher.”

  Arnaud Bucher was—or had been—John Davis’s conductor. Just what Davis needs, thought January. Yet another reason to have murdered Lorenzo Belaggio in an alley. I wonder when that was arranged, and if the State Prosecutor will bring it up at the trial. After the near-donnybrook in the prison watchroom two days previously, he’d lost what little hope he had ever had of any jury trying a Frenchman without politics entering in.

  “. . . Cinderella on Tuesday, and the incomparable Roman tragedy Norma by Bellini on Friday, which will bring us to the final opera of the season,” Belaggio continued over the surge of polite applause, “Orfeo ed Euridice, for which I promise you, with my hand upon my heart, the most unsurpassed and dazzling spectacle of all.”

  “Orfeo ed Euridice?” said Hannibal, startled, as the gaslights in the house went up. “What happened to Der Freischütz?”

  “Orfeo ed Euridice?” January pinched out his candle and got to his feet, gathered his gloves and music. “GLUCK’s Orfeo ed Euridice? He’s going to put that on for Americans?”

  “You think Americans won’t appreciate the Dance of the Blessed Spirits?” Hannibal’s eyebrows quirked. “The most beautiful piece of music Gluck—or almost anyone else—ever wrote?”

  “I think Americans won’t sit still for two hours of people singing arias about Love at each other without anything resembling a duel, or a riot, or even a kiss . . . Sir.” He hastened to overtake Belaggio as the impresario strode backstage, almost running to the shelter of the green room.

  “Sir, are you sure Orfeo is a good choice? Please excuse me for speaking, but—”

  At January’s first word, Belaggio slewed around, the blank terror of startlement on his face changing swiftly to pugnacity. “What is a bad choice about it?” His jaw thrust forward, as it had when January had raised the subject of Othello. “It is Gluck!”

  “It is absolutely static. Sir. The music is beautiful, but absolutely nothing happens on-stage. Nothing. It’s like trying to stage Dante’s Paradiso. Two people stand and sing at each other, then two more people come and sing at each other—”

  “Nonsense!” The big man waved January back as Anne Trulove and Caldwell, champagne and foie gras in hand on plates of gold-rimmed china, looked at one another uncertainly: January had spoken, not in Italian, but in English. “You are thinking of another Orfeo, my friend. We will have fire, varoosh!” He swept his arm in the direction of the satanic cave, still faintly wreathed in smoke, on which several of the Sicilians in the chorus were perched with their plates of bread-and-butter. “We will have writhing choruses of devils—ba run da-da dum! We will have angels floating down from the heavens—”

  “Dancing angels!” cried Mr. Trulove ecstatically, clasping white-gloved hands before his breast and casting a lovelorn eye at Oona Flaherty.

  “We will have an audience that falls asleep in its chairs,” muttered Hannibal, fortunately in German, which no one but January—and the Herren Smith and Pleck, currently out of earshot—understood.

  “Fire always makes a spectacle on-stage,” approved Caldwell, who probably couldn’t have distinguished Gluck from Goosey-Goosey-Gander. “And it’s the spectacle that puts bums on seats, you know. That’s where we’ve been ahead of Davis all the way along. We’ve got the French Opera House licked—absolutely licked!” he added, throwing a triumphant glance back at the patrons of the Opera Society. Jed Burton and Hubert Granville raised their glasses to him; their wives nodded in a forest of plumes. “Of course, I’m sorry about Mr. Davis—it’s ridiculous to think he’d have had anything to do with poor Marsan’s being killed that way—but it’ll come to nothing in court, you mark my words.”

  He put a hand on Belaggio’s massive shoulder, steered him away in the direction of the overcrowded green room, and January knew better than to follow. “Now, how, exactly, do you propose we dress the ballet for this Dance of the Blessed Spirits? Could we have them all come down from the flies on wires? And if we used ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ . . .”

  “Cheer up.” Hannibal handed January a plate of pound-cake. “Austrian agents may murder the lot of us before we have to participate in a debacle of this scope.”

  “If they don’t,” retorted January glumly, “I can guarantee you the American audience will.”

  TWENTY

  “Have you learned anything?” Cyril LeMoyne lifted a stack of ledgers, newspapers, and two volumes of Blackstone’s Commentaries from the spare chair in his office, looked around seeking another place to set them, and finally settled for moving a half-empty cup of coffee aside to balance them on a towering column of similar composition on the corner of his desk. “Anything at all?” January would have shifted his chair sideways to get a better view past it of the little attorney’s face, but a couple of deed-boxes and another stack of books—the Code Napoleon and most of the Law Code of the State of Louisiana— wedged him immovably into place.

  He leaned sideways to talk.

  “No more than I told you Monday morning,” he said. “No further odd occurrences, unless you count Caldwell’s plans to replace the ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ with ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’ No threats or attacks on me or anyone else. Marguerite seems a little better—she’s conscious for a few minutes at a time—but still doesn’t remember what happened.” He had just come from breakfast with Olympe and her family, and though his friend’s listlessness still troubled him, he was beginning to feel hope.

  “I made the time before last night’s performance to speak to the stable-hands at the Promenade Hotel,” he went on. “One of them—Scipion—heard the attack on Belaggio in the alley and went to open the gate; he says a man in a cloak and a mask thrust it open moments before he got there, shoved him aside, and darted across the yard and into the hotel. He thinks the man was short. The yard was dark by the gate, though
there was some light closer to the hotel. Scipion’s not a tall man himself.”

  “Telling us exactly nothing,” responded LeMoyne gloomily. “The number of not-very-tall men walking around New Orleans masked, armed, cloaked, and in evening-dress on any night during Carnival rivals the mise-en-scène of the average Venetian melodrama. The prosecution would point out that the description fits Davis as well as Incantobelli—or myself, for that matter.”

  “Or a woman,” said January. “Breeched or not— cloaked and in darkness, it would be difficult to tell. What happened at the arraignment?”

  LeMoyne flung up an ink-smudged, despairing hand. “What didn’t happen? Tillich positively identified John Davis as the man he saw at the City Hotel the night of the murder—waistcoat, watch-chains, voice. . . . Davis swore he was at home in bed. Wasn’t this a peculiar place for the owner of a gaming-house during Carnival? Davis said he hadn’t felt well, hadn’t been well for some weeks. Did he have a physician who could attest to that? Well, no, he hadn’t gone to a physician. . . .”

  “If a man’s trying to convince the City Council to award his contracting company the rights to build a steam railway,” said January, “he isn’t about to let anyone think he might be ill. Not that Mr. Davis would admit he was unwell for anything short of a broken leg—and I’ve seen him run the Théâtre with that, or a broken foot, anyway. Nothing slows him down.”

  “I should introduce him to my sister.” LeMoyne scratched around in the mounds of papers, all dribbled with pooled tallow and interspersed with candles stuck at random on shelves and corners. January shuddered at the thought of one of them being knocked over some night. “I would, too, except she’s busy running a tile factory, a dress-shop, a printing business in Le Havre, and our sister’s marriage. She even plays dominoes fast. Can you see a blue-bound notebook anywhere? He’d have done better to look a little feebler—God knows his color was as bad as ever I’ve seen a man’s—but he was head-up and scrappy, and seemed perfectly capable of taking on a man Belaggio’s size who’d insulted him. Then, of course, everyone had to get into the act, putting themselves forward as character witnesses, Pitot and Freret and Blanc and Dizon and half the Creole aldermen . . .”