The Black Opera (70 page)

A hand closed over his shoulder, firmly shaking him.

He opened his eyes to a different light.

A quick glance at the clocks told Conrad it was now closer to nine in the morning than eight.

Only five-and-twenty minutes asleep? It feels like a year!

Enrico Mantenucci patted him again on the shoulder, with a wry smile. “Fabrizio's patrol sent word back. No Prince's Men at Pusilleco, but people had obviously been there. Judging by the remains of food, they stayed there overnight.”

The police Commendatore frowned.

“I don't trust soldiers to have questioned witnesses properly, but according to what their lieutenant says, there weren't any baggage carts, just coaches. One woman thought she saw a
cello
case, of all things… So I suspect singers and musicians went that way, but as for stage scenery and props—could the black opera be a concert performance?”

“If they want to be as powerful as something staged at the San Carlo, with an audience of over three thousand? No.”

The sleep made Conrad freshly alert, but he felt the antipathy to direct light that was his early warning of hemicrania. He turned his back on the windows, to avoid triggering it, and gave Enrico a nod as the man was summoned back to Ferdinand's side.

Beside him, Roberto Capiraso spoke in a hard voice. “Congratulations.”

Conrad poured out more wine for himself, and, after hesitation, for the other man. “In your place,
I
wouldn't know what to want, either.”

“Throw her into jail, her and all her radicalist friends!”

Conrad realised that Roberto Capiraso had opened the score of
Il Reconquista d'amore
on the King's desk, and was using his steel pen to make alterations.

He couldn't help a prod. “Revising that
finale ultimo?”

“Not at all.”

The Count sounded as much
il Superbo
as if he were in a drawing-room, not in handcuffs. You would have to know him well to sense his inner frantic turmoil. Conrad realised that he did.

“It occurred to me,” Roberto said, eyes still fixed on the paper. “I had the better part of two years to write this. I wrote several careful drawing-room pieces during that period, to see how various arias would sound in public… A few months ago, when I was told I would also be composing the counter-opera, I thought I hardly needed to
sabotage
anything. What kind of an opera can any man write in six or ten weeks?”

Conrad almost choked on outrage. “Donizetti! Pacini! Mercadante!
Meyerbeer!
Signore Rossini's comedies! Even the new men, Signore Verdi and Herr Wagner!”

Roberto Capiraso sat back in his chair, ignoring the two troopers behind him. Clearly, he distracted himself from thinking of what was going on. But, clearly, he also meant what he said.

“I wasn't then so familiar with the inner workings of opera. Here, creating
L'Altezza azteca
… It was exhilarating. That I might bring music forth at such speed, and of such quality. It had to be inferior to the black opera, but I could add that afterwards—subtle mistakes in structure and ornamentation at key points, and stretching voice control to destruction. The rest of
L'Altezza
is—is
good
. And then… I realised that, although I thought
Il Reconquista
finished—it could be so much better.”

By the look on Roberto's face, realisation tasted like sucking a lemon.

“You and I were working together, Corrado. I rehearsed your singers with young Paolo. Every day I could see a way of doing things better. Those I could, I added into
Il Reconquista
. A few got past my guard and into
L'Altezza azteca
. It is very hard to cripple something short of being sublime.”

Conrad opened his mouth—and shut it again.

Il Superbo is very nearly entitled to that. No matter who he is or what he's done
.

Roberto added, “Your cousin and the rest of them, they have an instinct for when something could be better. I hadn't foreseen that I would be unmercifully
badgered
… For a better aria for themselves, yes, perhaps! But last week I actually had Estella Belucci accost me to demand that I strengthen Signore Velluti's part in the finale!”

Conrad suppressed a snort. “The magnitude of that miracle!”

Roberto Capiraso bowed his head. The early morning light showed bruising and swelling along his jaw. “Perhaps I'll be allowed the scores, after they imprison me.”

Without looking up at Conrad, he crossed out a phrase of the music, and wrote a different one in the margin.

Why is it possible to want this man
not
to end in Ischia prison?

Conrad shook his head.

Doors clicked open. King Ferdinand strode in, from a further room. He spoke with Enrico Mantenucci, and Conrad didn't interrupt.
If there was news, we'd be told.

Through the still-open doors, he glimpsed a mass of people. Unsurprisingly, there were numerous clergy, and in the mass of black, he could see priests from all the city's churches, Dominicans; no sign of Cardinal Corazza.

Conrad took the rest in in a glance before servants closed the double doors. A family—grandfather, father, and son?—with a definable air of wealth and danger. Their faces had in the past been pointed out to Conrad, as they rode Spaccanapoli Street in fine carriages, with the warning
“Camorra.”
A very Borgia-looking family of two brothers in early middle age, and a younger sister, who had similar rumours attached in Catania, in island-Sicily. Spoken of in undertones as “Honoured Men.”

Uncomfortable beside them, a Colonel in Hussar uniform was plainly not from any of the Italian kingdoms. He might have been German, or English, and was speaking to a Turk in uniform jacket and baggy breeches. Conrad recognised faces familiar from Neapolitan salons and opera boards. One man—by the close presence of Ferdinand's royal guard, he might have been under arrest—Conrad knew as a writer from the
Giornale
.

Key men that he keeps under control, or needs as allies. Friends. Enemies. Neutral parties who may become either.

Insistent thoughts of Leonora threatened. Distracting himself, Conrad pulled the maps of Naples and the countryside across Ferdinand's desk, and leaned down to study them.

The map of the Phlegraean Peninsula came first to hand. Conrad traced with a forefinger the road from Naples to the Grotto. West, through the Grotto itself. The road beyond, across the
Campi Flegrei
, the Burning Fields, to the small thriving port of Pozzuoli, protected by its own cliff-top fort.

He let his fingers trace the maze of small roads and tracks around Pozzuoli. Lake Averno, one of many volcanic pools. The cone of Monte Nuovo. Solfatera's sulphur springs…

One of the more defined roads ran across
Campi Flegrei
, from the western end of the Grotto of Posillipo towards Pozzuoli, and made a cross-roads with a north-south road that had existed—Conrad's spotty Classical education reminded him—at least since Hellenic settlers in
Magna Graecia
founded Napoli
as “Neapolis,”
“new city,”
nine centuries before Christ, and long before even the Romans.

It must be an antiquarian map that Ferdinand has
, Conrad realised. Classical ruins were marked, dotting the landscape—

“What is it?” Roberto Capiraso's voice spoke at his ear.

“What?”

“What have you seen?”

Conrad, startled out of concentration, realised he had frozen with one finger on the map. “You said you rehearsed in Nero's theatre?”

The Conte di Argente looked very humanly puzzled. “Under the Mercato. What has that to do with the
Campi Flegrei
?”

Ferdinand emerged from a group of Mantenucci's constables and strode towards his desk.

He seemed to catch the tension in the air. “Conrad?”

The ormolu clock on the mantle, above the carved arms of the King of the Two Sicilies, chimed the hour. Conrad startled, as if it had been cannon-fire.
Nine in the morning, on the fourteenth of March.

Conrad's spine shivered and pulled his shoulder-blades tight with tension. “We…were talking about antique ruins. It's likely nothing—but—I went there as a child. And once as a young man—when I thought I might take up water-colour—”

“Corrado!” Ferdinand exclaimed, not unkindly. “You have something that will help?”

“A ruin of pagan Rome, sir.”

Conrad slid his finger back an inch on the map, uncovering the detail that seemed to burn into his retina.

A small oval.

Small on this scale map
.

“On the road out from Posillipo, sir, going towards Pozzuoli. The port would mean it could be reached without needing to enter Naples. Most of it is still intact—the part above-ground, certainly, because stone survives.”

Ferdinand looked down at the map, and then blankly up at Conrad.

Conrad used his nail to underscore the words printed on the map beside the small oval.

“‘Anfiteatro Grande.'
The Flavian Amphitheatre
.”

He lifted his head, to meet Ferdinand's blue gaze, and finished:

“It once seated forty thousand men. And—sir, what's the best substitute for a theatre? A theatre.”

“O
n the
Burning Fields
?” Enrico Mantenucci sounded flatly incredulous. “You think they'll use a
ruin
as a theatre, in volcanic fields? When they know to expect an eruption! Are you telling me the Prince's Men are planning to blow themselves up?”

Roberto Capiraso interrupted harshly.

“Leonora's
dead
.”

Pain twisted his face, and for a moment it seemed he couldn't speak. Finally:

“Very little can hurt her. She doesn't care about singers and musicians—once they've done what they're meant to. They themselves believe implicitly in the goals of the Prince's Men.
You have no idea how deep their ethic of sacrifice goes
.”

Silence lengthened.

Ferdinand clapped his hands, breaking it.

“If the Prince's Men
are
near the
Anfiteatro Grande
, they ought to be visible. Fabrizio, you have sufficient spare men to take a company out through Posillipo and examine the Flavian Amphitheatre?”

Fabrizio Alvarez smiled for the first time that Conrad had noticed; a slow, warm expression. “I dare say I can dredge up a hundred men from somewhere, sire.”

“Take some of Enrico's people with you; they know the roads.”

Mantenucci re-buttoned his uniform jacket correctly. “I'll come with you, Fabrizio, if you like; I started as a officer in Pusilleco. Sire, Captain Esposito can stay in charge of security in the San Carlo; they know him. I could do with a ride to clear my head…”

Ferdinand's quick nod held amusement; clearly he suspected that Enrico Mantenucci's lack of sleep had been augmented overnight with bottles of wine.

“Be back before midday. Our guests will expect to meet the Commendatore of Napoli.”

Conrad clenched his fist, nails digging into his palm. He just managed not to exclaim
Figlia di puttana!
out loud.

When Tullio gets back, some time this morning!
How do I explain that the world's changed—
utterly
—in the few days he's been gone?

Ferdinand turned a severe gaze on Roberto Capiraso. “How long will it take to perform the black opera?”

“If
Il Reconquista d'amore
is performed without cuts—and I think they won't dare to cut it, without me—then, the better part of three hours. Much like
The Aztec Princess
is now. I believe they must start when you do, when the Sun and Moon pull strongest, early this afternoon. By two at the latest.”

“And one must assume that they have preparations to make, if it is the Anfiteatro they're using… If the performance is interrupted, then there's no chance of a miracle?”

“I hope that's true, sire.”

Conrad glanced from Ferdinand's practised unconcern, to Roberto's bleak, elsewhere-stare.

“There's much I wasn't told,” the Count said. “In the worst case—the very worst—then, once begun, the process of the miracle is also begun, and can't be stopped.”

The King paced a few turns by his desk. “If
that
were true, the same would be true of the counter-miracle we perform, and what might result from such a paradox, God working against Himself—dear Lord, no!”

“Leonora could have explained it better.” The Conte di Argente spoke as if it cost him no pain or hatred to say her name. “The forces under the earth don't stop being vulnerable at the moment the Moon passes overhead. Volcanic earth is most easily made to erupt at the height of the earth-tides, but there's a certain amount of time after, while the Moon passes over the Tyrrhenean Sea, in which the same effect might be forced to continue. With difficulty, but it's possible.”