The Black Opera (45 page)

“I won't abandon my sister just because I have a lover,” he repeated, hoping that would drive it home. “Do I worry about you and your beaus?”

Isaura banged her forehead on his shoulder before she looked up again. “I
keep
putting my foot in my mouth… I didn't mean I wouldn't ask for your
advice
, Corrado. Of course I will! I just meant, I won't ask the family's permission to get married. If I get married, and don't just take lovers.”

Conrad glanced down at her in the curve of his arm. So close, she felt a very slight, small figure.

With utter determination, she said, “I'll make up my own mind about who I want.”

Conrad brushed her shaggy hair out of her eyes with his free hand, and couldn't help a smile. “Given that you don't seem Sapphic, I suppose I can take it that will be a man?—”

He took advantage of her muttering about how he hardly knew her well enough to say
that
, to add:

“—In which case, I'd be obliged if I can put it about to the company that you're not in need of the Church's strictures against perversion?”

“You mean, tell them I'm a woman?”

Isaura tilted her head on one side, considering.

He saw the moment that she seized on an idea with the design of amusing him.

“Why don't you just get Sandrine to put it about that I'm
not
a sodomite? And I'll run a book with Captain Luigi on how long it'll take one of them to guess
why?”

Conrad had the impulse to throw his hands up dramatically, after the fashion of Barjaba. “No wonder Signore Rossini says that every impresario in Italy is bald by the age of thirty! If they didn't tear their hair out, it would fall out from worry!
You
have definitely been in bad company—and don't tell me the police are the custodians of public virtue; Luigi Esposito wouldn't know a virtue if he found one on the bottom of his shoe!”

Isaura snuffled back a giggle. She leaned out of his hug, across the table, fetching the wine bottle. “Since Luigi's a friend of yours, I suppose you ought to know!”

She sighed, and was as suddenly serious.

“Corradin, can I help you, at all? I'd like to. I… know you and il Superbo don't get on—for very obvious reasons—but you
have
to work together now. Can I do anything?”

Conrad raised an eyebrow. “You mean to say il Conte has actually
spoken
to his first violin?”

Paolo-Isaura grinned crookedly, and then sobered. “He's come down here almost every day, adjusting the score when we rehearse. We still call him ‘Superbo,' but… it's become less unkind.” She hesitated. “I think he may have been trying to make up for his bad behaviour. He's working himself into the dirt on
L'Altezza
, like the rest of us. I know he was a swine to you, Corrado, and I know the situation you're in, but—he'll work professionally with you if you let him.”

“Hn. Maybe.” Conrad shook his head. “I don't think there's anything you can do to help. But thank you. And for reminding me I can't put it off much longer, if
The Aztec Princess
is going to be finished.”

He stood, and realised she had caught the cuff of his coat. He looked down at her.

Paolo said slowly, “When you said Leonora was Malibran standard, was that the lover speaking, or the opera
aficionado?”

“Before she died, she went on at La Fenice. The opinion was not just mine.”

The disguised woman tapped her fingers together. “I just thought… We
desperately
need another good voice tutor. Granted she can't sing, but—could she teach? Not down here—the Argente mansion is very well guarded—she could see the chorus singers in her drawing-room?”

Leonora, close enough for any excuse to visit her
…

“Dear
God!”
Conrad muttered, breathless.

Paolo-Isaura gave him a much-recovered smile. “And there you go again! I
am
a bad influence. “Her expression turned serious. “I'll go talk to her, since I'm in charge of rehearsals. But… you're my brother.”

Conrad read the unspoken
And I won't do it if you can't bear the temptation
in Paolo's determined gaze.

“Go ahead, brat. This collection of divas need an expert coach. Do what the counter-opera needs.”

She glanced around once to see they were unobserved, and sprang up to give him a hug.

And since the day's already gone to hell…

He ruffled her hair out of all order, breaking the heavily-charged atmosphere.

“I ought not to talk to Nora,” he said ruefully, “and I have to talk to Il Superbo. Not the way I'd have it. Where is he?”

“Up at the Palazzo Reale.” Isaura frowned, and put her hands on Conrad's shoulders. “I know you told me, when I was little, that you were determined to be nothing like our father… You do some admirable things, Corrado. I just want you to know that I notice that.”

Being still among the living, there was no physiological reason to prevent him from blushing.

Conrad went off to find an escort from one of Alvarez's men, feeling himself burning hot to the tips of his ears.

I'm obliged to be professional with il Conte di Argente for many reasons. One of which is, because my sister thinks me a considerably better man than I am
.

The ever-quickening clock made it mid-afternoon when he left the underground passages of Naples. His eyes, accustomed to lesser light, flinched back from the bright sky. Dazzled, he followed the escort from Alvarez's Rifles into the Palazzo Reale. He dismissed the troopers before he made his way to the museum of archaeological erotica.

Between Leonora and the counter-opera, Conrad found his thoughts not able to settle. Like a set of scales, pressure to remove one subject only made the other rise up into his mind.

The Palace building jolted.

It was a distant bang, as if from a quarry or a pile-driving team at work—but too far off to be that. It gave the impression that something had taken hold of the world and given it a sharp diagonal knock.

Conrad felt it at the same time peculiarly disconcerting—his animal nature insisted the earth should always be solid; should
not
move—and wholly mundane. Live in Naples and one becomes used to a tremor or two from Vesuvius.

Is Ferdinand correct? Should I attribute that to the black opera in rehearsal?

No evidence either way
.

Conrad unlocked the door of the secret museum, entered, locked it again, and threw his coat and hat over the cabinet containing a satyr in congress with two wood nymphs.

At the far end of the room, Roberto Capiraso was silhouetted against the bright, seaward-facing windows. He leaned with one arm on the upright piano, looking down at the keys, picking out the line of a melody which now tapered off.

Conrad took a breath. “Signore Conte.”

I
n the silence, Conrad unlocked the drawer and took out his folders. He had a strong impulse to leave, taking them with him, below Naples. Only necessity—and the thought that it would be a retreat—prevented him acting.

The expectation of a jeer set his teeth on edge. Nothing came. Looking up, he saw the Conte di Argente's expression was vaguely constipated. Conrad finally identified the man's stifled emotion.

He's embarrassed
.

He deserves to be!

“I suppose this must be awkward for you.” Conrad broke the silence. “When you sent me to prison, did you think about when we'd have to work together again? Or didn't you think ahead?”

Roberto Conte di Argente glared from under heavy brows.

“I suppose,” he said stiffly, “that I took some decisions that were—unwise.”

Hardly a grovelling apology
.

But then again, it's il Superbo
.

Remembering asking—
begging
—for help against di Galdi… stuck in Conrad's throat like an immovable bone.

He considered what he could safely say, and hurled caution through the window. “Tell me—what exactly did I do to earn your hatred?”

Other than it being easier to hate me than to hate Nora?

The Count shifted his gaze. He stared out at the sea.

“Apparently,” Roberto Capiraso broke the longer silence, “after six years—she still remembers your name.”

It momentarily overwhelmed Conrad.

She does? My name? More? Everything she and I went through, does she still recall it, no matter that she's been through death…?

Roberto Capiraso said sternly, “Do
not
pity me.”

Startled, Conrad reflected,
He can read what I think quicker than
I
can
.

The feeling had only just begun to come clear in his mind that, if their positions were reversed, he would not find being in il Conte di Argente's place very enviable.

The melodic line of the priests' hymn to Cortez as Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered
Serpent god, meandered on the warm air. From Capiraso's fingers, it came out more melancholy than Conrad had envisaged.

“Polite hypocrisy won't solve this,” Capiraso said.

“Nor lies.” Conrad added, “Please don't suggest that you regret your actions.”

“No, indeed.” The other man had a glint in his eye.

“So?”

Roberto Capiraso straightened up from the forte-piano. Silence fell. “So… You don't point out to the King that his composer, too, might just as well create his music in one of his Majesty's cells?”

Perfectly truthfully, Conrad said, “I might if it had occurred to me.”

“Ah. My thanks to… your inadequate sense of vengeance, then.”

And there's that dry sense of humour again
.

Conrad felt himself oddly wistful that it was not possible to fall back into their old relationship.
No matter that we dislike each other
, L'Altezza azteca
is better when we co-operate.

“Working white-knuckled is not the best way to produce an opera,” Conrad mused aloud.

The Conte di Argente made a short bow, as one gentleman conceding an argument to another.

He has at least made
some
offer of apology
, Conrad thought. And he's polite. Has Ferdinand spoken to him? Or Nora? Or does Capiraso consider himself honour-bound not to upset the production of the counter-opera…?

“I made my own decision, not the King's or my wife's.” The Count's tone was amused, but oddly unmalicious. “You might as well write what you think on your forehead; it's as easy to read.”

“Thank you,” Conrad said ironically.

He found himself exchanging an unspoken and perfectly-understood look with the other man.

Everything can wait for two weeks
. What I need, desperately, to say to Nora—It can wait until after the first night of
L'Altezza azteca
. What I still owe this man after di Galdi and the prison… Two weeks is not a long time.

Roberto Capiraso drew in a breath and let it out.

“I have questions regarding some passages…” He took from his jacket what looked like one of Paolo's endless scruffy lists. “We have gaps all the way through, that we
must
now fill in, and hardly any of the necessary verses for the end of Acts Three and Four.”

“Give me your notes,” Conrad said. “Why don't you play me the new material while I look over your queries?”

Roberto Capiraso lifted a folder that rested on top of the upright piano, and
extracted a sheet of paper with the staves scored by quick slashes of a pen. Conrad's own words were scribbled over the top, with many alterations.

“First…” Capiraso separated and threw a section of the score across the green-topped table. “…I've tightened your friend Spinelli's entrance in Act III.”