“This,” said the Duke, indicating the little door, “is the stage manager’s office. The one opposite is the orchestra conductor’s dressing room. And there . . . such a tragedy . . . in my . . . in our great theater . . . ”
Ricciardi looked around to register as many details as possible. The last door the theater director had indicated had been taken off its hinges. There were fragments of wood on the floor and the lock, still secure, dangled, almost completely torn off. The doorjamb showed visible damage: the door had been forced from the outside, you could tell by the position of the doorknob and by the distorted bolt. All around them, a colourful crowd: the Commissario saw clowns, common folk in Sicilian regional costumes, Calabrian peasants, Harlequin and Columbine. He felt the onset of a severe headache. On top of it all, the place was overheated and he was wearing a heavy overcoat.
“Who broke down the door?” he asked.
“I did,” said a large, heavyset man with red hair and a dishevelled look. “I’m the stage manager, Giuseppe Lasio.”
“Who alerted you?”
“We did. We came to bring him his costume. We knocked for five minutes, we called out, but no one answered.” The person who had chimed in was an imposing, middle-aged woman, wearing a blue smock and a pair of large scissors hanging from a ribbon around her neck. At her side was a young woman struggling to hold up a dress-hanger which held a large, very colourful clown’s costume.
“Don’t let anyone move until I come out of the room. Maione, see to it.”
Maione knew what he had to do: he went to the unhinged door, looked inside the room, made sure there was no one in there and said, “Stand back, all of you. Commissario, it’s all yours.”
Ricciardi went to the door, lowered his eyes and stepped inside.
Don Pierino, halfway through Cavalleria Rusticana, was pleasantly surprised. The opera was actually a side dish, or rather an appetizer, for Pagliacci and the appearance of the great Vezzi. The Assistant Pastor, like many others, was so eager to see the tenor’s spectacular display that he would have gladly reversed the canonical order of the works. Instead, to his amazement, the singers of Cavalleria were giving a brilliant performance. The tenor who played Turiddu, the soprano in the role of Santuzza and especially the baritone, Alfio, seemed in top form and eager to make a good impression in the presence of such a talent. Even the orchestra was proving to be equal to the task, and their execution, having now arrived at the chorus following the musical intermezzo, was evolving from noteworthy to memorable. Don Pierino was so moved by the poignant music that he didn’t realize he had shifted, stepping back into part of the narrow staircase that led backstage. When he felt someone bump into him from behind, he turned around, surprised.
“Excuse me,” a tall, stout man whispered distractedly; he was bundled up in a roomy black overcoat, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a white scarf.
“No, my fault, excuse me,” don Pierino replied, hastily repairing to his niche. Worried about being discovered, he was afraid of causing problems for poor Patrisso. But the man didn’t seem to think anything of his being there, and descending the remaining steps, headed for the dressing rooms. Don Pierino followed him with his eyes: was it possible that he was . . . In fact, the man, glancing around, paused a moment outside the door bearing a plaque which read: Arnaldo Vezzi. He said something and slipped into the dressing room. The priest nearly fainted: he had bumped into the greatest tenor on the planet! He sighed, and smiling, turned his attention back to the stage, where Turiddu was proposing a toast, extolling the praises of unadulterated wine.
The dressing room was cold, Ricciardi noted that right away. He looked toward the window and realized that it was partly open, letting in blasts of wintry wind and the scent of damp grass from the Royal Gardens. The bulbs over the mirror were lit, flooding the small room with light. There was blood everywhere. The corpse was on the chair in front of the mirror, bent over the dressing table, his back to the door. The mirror was completely shattered, except for the upper part that was spattered with blood. Glass was all over the place.
The body’s head lay on the tabletop, resting on the left cheek; on the right, a large fragment of mirror jutted out from the throat, reflecting a vitreous eye and a twisted mouth from which a trickle of drool oozed. Ricciardi heard singing in a soft voice:
“Io sangue voglio, all’ira m’abbandono, in odio tutto l’amor mio finì . . . ”, I will have vengeance, My rage shall know no bounds, And all my love. Shall end in hate.
On the visible side of the face, the thick layer of grease paint was lined with the trace of a tear. The Commissario turned and, in the corner between the shattered mirror’s frame and the wall, saw the image of Arnaldo Vezzi standing up, slightly bent at the knees, his face covered with make-up, his clown’s mouth laughing. Fake tears drawn on his eyes, real tears down his cheeks. The right hand, palm open, stretched out as if to push someone away, and thick streams of blood pumped out by his dying heart through the gash on the right side of his neck. Ricciardi studied the ghost, taking his time: the lifeless eyes stared ahead without seeing him, the lips mouthed the lyrics and the chest no longer moved. The Commissario took one last look at the corpse. The clown’s final song, just for him, and he didn’t even understand opera. He turned towards the door and went out.
VII
Don Pierino, entranced, watched the audience give a standing ovation to the troupe who had just concluded Cavalleria Rusticana. He was particularly proud, since he had seen the rehearsals the day before—using his usual mode of entry—and had grown fond of the singers. There were no prima donnas, only talented young people and some unassuming, easy-going professionals. A certain team spirit could be felt among them and it was pleasant to see how their camaraderie and mutual respect had generated the evening’s success.
For the most part, the company was made up of local artists and served to fill in the ‘gaps’ that the season sometimes experienced due to illness or injuries on the part of the established players. Once they had rehearsed La Traviata in a week, due to the cancellation of Swan Lake when the prima ballerina sprained her ankle. But this time, don Pierino thought, they had really outdone themselves.
As he was enjoying the second call for the entire cast—the performers all holding hands and bowing to the public—he heard a woman’s shrill scream behind him, coming from the dressing rooms.
The priest was used to hearing emotional outbursts in the cool darkness of the confessional, and his long-time passion as an opera-goer had trained his ear to the tones associated with different moods. He had no doubt or difficulty recognizing the horror, the shock. He turned and rushed towards the scream, his heart in his mouth. A small crowd was already gathering in front of Vezzi’s dressing room.
Ricciardi looked around and spoke without addressing anyone in particular.
“I’m going into that office now,” he said indicating the stage manager’s small room, “and one by one Brigadier Maione will admit those I tell him. No one can go home, no one can leave the theater. No one can enter this dressing room, unless he’s called in. You can’t stay here, you must go somewhere else . . .” He thought for a moment. Yes. “On the stage. You will all gather on the stage, until we have finished. For the rest, clear the theater of everyone who could not have had access to this area: the public, the entrance staff. The police, however, will take everyone’s information.”
The theater director was purple with rage and rose up on his toes, sputtering.
“Such an affront . . . it’s . . . it’s unthinkable. Access to this area of the theater is highly restricted and selective. Moreover . . . do you realize who was in the audience tonight? And you want them to record information from the prefect, the nobility, the hierarchies . . . I demand, I insist that you respect the roles.”
“My role is to reveal a murderer. Yours, sir, under these circumstances, is to facilitate my operation. Any other stance would co
nstitute a crime, and would be prosecuted. Act accordingly.”
Ricciardi’s voice was a hiss, his green gaze was fixed on the director’s face without batting an eye. The little man seemed to deflate, his heels settling on the floor in silence. He lowered his eyes and muttered: “I’ll see to it at once. But I will speak out in the appropriate venues.”
“Do whatever you like. Now go.”
Stiffly, trying for some trace of his lost dignity, the director turned and walked towards the stage, followed by those present and their murmured comments.
The stage manager’s office was tiny, almost entirely filled by a desk that held disorderly piles of drawings, notes and pages of scripts annotated by hand. On the walls, posters of performances. Two chairs stood in front of the desk, one behind. Light and air came from a small window high above. The first person Ricciardi spoke to was the stage manager himself, Giuseppe Lasio, the rumpled man who had broken down the door to Vezzi’s dressing room.
“What exactly is your role?”
“I’m in charge of the staging. Virtually everything that has to do with the stage is under my direction. The lighting technicians, the actors’ entrances and exits, the fixtures and equipment. Everything that isn’t artistic; organizational support, in a word.”
“What happened tonight? Tell me everything, please: even details that you think are insignificant.”
Lasio frowned under his mop of red hair.
“It was after the intermezzo of Cavalleria, we were handling the exit after the toast. It’s a choral scene, the entire company is onstage. The set was ready, the backdrop was in place. Signora Lilla came to call me at the stage entrance.”
“Signora Lilla?”
“Letteria Galante, but we call her Signora Lilla. She’s in charge of the theater’s wardrobe department, for the principal actors she delivers the costumes directly. You’ve seen her, she’s that . . . large woman. Sicilian. Very, very capable. Anyway, she came and told me: ‘Sir, Vezzi isn’t opening the door. We knocked, we called, but he doesn’t answer.’”
“We?”
“Yes, she was with a young woman from wardrobe. There are thirty of them, I don’t know them all. They were bringing his Canio costume, the clown outfit that you yourself later saw the girl holding. I rushed down, in a hurry, there’s not a very long break between the end of Cavalleria and the beginning of Pagliacci, and Vezzi is . . . was . . . not always—how shall I put it?—precise and punctual. Sometimes he disappeared and we had to go looking around the theater for him, or even outside. He was one of the greats, you know: the greatest of all, onstage. But offstage, at times, he was difficult to manage. The kind who do whatever they like, and everyone else has to adapt. The privileges of talent.”
“And did he go out tonight? Did you see him go out?”
“No, not me. But I’m always on the go, so he could have escaped my notice. In any case, I went down to the dressing room and I realized that the door was locked. That never happens. The singers, Vezzi especially, don’t get up to open the door when they’re putting on their make-up. I was worried.”
“So what did you do?”
“After calling out to him myself, I thought Vezzi might not be feeling well so I kicked down the door. I was in the war, I’m used to seeing certain things. But I had never seen so much blood all at once. Signora Lilla came in behind me and screamed. Then everyone started running back and forth. I grabbed a stagehand and had him call you. Did I do the right thing?”
“Of course. After you, did anyone else enter the dressing room?”
“No. Definitely not. I myself waited by the door until you came. I was in the army, I told you. I know how things should be done.”
“One last thing. The dressing-room door was locked, we said. But I haven’t seen the key, either on the inside or on the outside. Did you remove it?”
Lasio ran his hands through his red hair, rumpling it even more, as he tried to remember.
“No, Commissario. The key wasn’t there, either inside or outside, come to think of it.”
“Thank you. You can leave the room, but don’t go away. I might need additional information. Maione, send in the two seamstresses.”
Signora Lilla sailed into the room like an ocean liner, filling the office. She was blonde, with piercing blue eyes. Behind her was the young woman, who by contrast seemed even smaller and thinner, wearing a smock at least one size too big. The large woman crossed her arms and looked at Ricciardi belligerently. “What do you mean, ‘No one can leave the theater’? What do you think, that it was us? Look, all of us are here to work, we don’t come here to do such awful things. We’re decent people.”
“No one is saying anything. Sit down and answer my questions. Tell me what happened.”
Heaving a sigh, the woman sat down heavily, as though having made her preliminary remarks, a weight had been lifted off her chest and she could now speak more politely. Or maybe it was because the Commissario’s determination, flashing out of those green eyes, brooked no opposition.
“We bring them down beforehand, the costumes. Long before. The normal singers try them on, ask for adjustments if needed, and that’s that. Him, instead . . . he wants twenty fittings. First it’s too short, then it’s too long. Too loose, too tight. The collar button doesn’t close. A real cross to bear. We’re on the fourth floor, Commissa’. If you’ll do us the honor, you’ll see for yourself how things are up there, thirty of us. In the summer, it’s so hot you can’t breathe, what with the charcoal for the irons, and pedalling those sewing machines. Not even the coolness of the gardens gets up there. In the winter, on the other hand, we have to sew with gloves that leave the lower ends of our fingers bare, and even with all the stoves, we’re covered with chilblains. But we don’t complain, right Maddale”—she turned to the girl—“because work is work and we do our job well. The San Carlo is famous throughout the world, for its costumes as well, and we are its costumes. Still, when Vezzi is here we’re constantly running up and down. Four flights of stairs, carrying pieces of fabric. But, God willing, the clown outfit was finally ready, down to the last adjustment made this very evening. I wanted to come down myself, with Maddalena here, to see if it suited him this time. And we found the door locked.”
Ricciardi was thinking that he wouldn’t have wanted to be in the tenor’s place, if the costume had needed further modifications. Then, remembering Vezzi’s current condition, he realized that his concern was pointless.
“What did you do when you realized the door was locked?”
“We called the stage manager, Lasio, to see what we should do. Otherwise we would have been blamed if the performance began late. He came and we waited outside the door.”
“And him?”
“He knocked, he called out, then he kicked the door down. Now that’s a man!” she said, suddenly coquettish. Ricciardi was stunned by the change. “Then I looked in and saw . . . it looked like the mattanza, the tuna slaughtering, in my village . . . I ran out. And that was it.”
“And you, Signorina . . . ?”
“Maddalena Esposito at your service, Commissa’.”
In further contrast to Signora Lilla, the young woman spoke softly, her eyes lowered. Neat and clean in her blue smock, her hands folded calmly in front of her, she was steady on her legs, though quite pale.
“Do you confirm everything?”
“Yes, sir, Commissa’. The Maestro was never satisfied; we adjusted his costume a number of times. Then I went down with Signora Lilla and the door was closed. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”
“All right. You may go. Maione, has the photographer arrived?”
VIII
The police investigation consisted of photographs of the corpse taken from various angles. Only afterwards was it possible to remove the evidence that would be preserved for future examination. Ricciardi insisted on being present, to study t
he crime scene one last time and to make certain that in the turmoil of gathering evidence, no detail was altered, no indication that might be essential to his work. So when he left the stage manager’s office, he found the photographer, the police technician and the coroner standing there sweating in their overcoats, waiting to be able to enter the dressing room. Acknowledging them with a nod, he went back inside to face the mirror fragments, the corpse and the tenor’s image.
The chill in the dressing room had grown even sharper as the evening grew damper and cold air kept flowing in through the partly open window.
Ricciardi leaned out, noting that there was a flower bed no more than six feet below, in the gardens of the Royal Palace. Incredible how going up and down the stairs in the theater made you lose all sense of what floor you were on. Ducking back in, he was blinded by the flash of a camera. He rubbed his eyes, seeing clearly only the image of the tenor who kept repeating his lines. He knew very well that it wasn’t his eyes that allowed him to see that vision. Once he was able to focus again, he noticed a detail that he had missed earlier: on the low sofa, beside the unhinged door, was a black overcoat with a broad-brimmed hat. On the floor, between the sofa and the corpse’s feet, was a white wool scarf. Something wasn’t right; what was it? It took Ricciardi a split second to figure it out: despite all that blood, lying right in the middle of a congealed puddle, the scarf was immaculate. Moving quickly, the Commissario picked the hat and coat up off the couch, revealing that the cushions underneath were soaked with the tenor’s blood. All except one, with blue and white stripes, which was spotless.
The coroner was circling the body, making observations and jotting quick notes in a small notebook with a black cover. When the camera flashes stopped, he moved the body with the technician’s help, transferring it on to the thick, blood-smeared carpet; the wool pullover that Vezzi had been wearing at the time of his death was completely saturated. How much blood could there be in the human body? And how much soul, Ricciardi thought, listening to the clown’s song as he stood in the corner with his upraised hand. Which will disappear first, this stain on the carpet, or the echo of that aria in my head?
I Will Have Vengeance Page 3