“If you must,” he replied with a hint of a sigh.
“Where were you between half past one and three o’clock yesterday afternoon?”
The singer pulled his chin back, clearly surprised. “I was at the theater—rehearsing the grand finale.”
“With the entire cast?”
“That’s right.”
“Was Majorano there?”
“Oh, yes. Signor Balbi had quite a struggle with him. No matter where Balbi placed me, Majorano insisted on standing several paces closer to the footlights.” Angeletto shook his head. “Majorano’s ambitions are so tiresome. If I were in charge, I would have dismissed him until he consented to take direction without argument. But Signor Balbi—truly, that man possesses the patience of a saint.”
I thought for a moment, chewing at the inside of my cheek. The picture Angeletto painted was wrong in one detail. “Signor Balbi was rehearsing the finale? Surely Signor Rocatti wasn’t closeted with Oriana—she plays a large part in the finale.”
“No, it wasn’t Oriana that claimed our director’s attention this time. Around noon, Rocatti was called away. He didn’t return for several hours. Since The Duke’s provo is scheduled for tomorrow, he turned the rehearsal over to Balbi rather than give the cast an extended break.”
“Called away, you say. Who called Rocatti away?” I was suddenly conscious of the blood drumming in my ears.
The singer frowned. I could see that my questions intrigued him, but to his credit, he didn’t hesitate. “It was Franco,” he answered. “You know, Signora Passoni’s companion. Franco had Aldo fetch Rocatti from the harpsichord. At first Rocatti seemed surprised to see Franco at the theater, but after he’d whispered a few words in his ear…” Angeletto paused to shrug. “Off they went.”
I held Angeletto’s gaze for a moment, then we both turned as banging noises came from the spiral staircase. Gussie’s haystack of yellow hair popped up at floor level. My brother-in-law climbed several more steps and questioned me with his eyes. Had we completed our conversation? I nodded. It was time to leave. I had strained Gussie’s good graces long enough and doubted that I would gain anything more of interest from the angelic castrato.
Besides, I had another stop to make before my newly-won strength gave out.
Chapter Twenty
It wasn’t terribly difficult to find Peppino. The man and his boat were a fixture on the canals, and it seemed that everyone in the neighborhood of Maestro Torani’s lodgings knew where the gondolier generally took his dinner. I was directed down a tortuous alley running north from the Calle Castangna, to a tavern where the kitchen’s only dish appeared to be pidocchi, our national soup of lagoon mussels and whatever vegetables the cook had at hand.
By virtue of my attire and bearing, I stood out in this rough place, but such was Venice on the eve of Carnival that few of the diners so much as flicked an eyelid. With the streets filling up with costumed Moors and Red Indians, horned devils and capering pirates, one operatic eunuch was unlikely to cause a stir.
Only Peppino eyed me with an air of suspicion as I crossed the long, dimly lit room to his table. Torani’s boatman had tied a once-white napkin around his neck and was tucking into a steaming bowl of soup. Its fragrance was much more appetizing than the odor of cheap wine and old sweat that permeated the smoky tavern. I waved down Peppino when he made motion to rise and remove the napkin.
“Sit, my friend. Let’s not stand on ceremony,” I called, then eased onto the bench across from him. A hanging lamp threw a yellow glow on his sunken, stubbled cheeks. Unlike some of his compatriots, he’d removed his cap; a faded red-and-white kerchief contained his lank dark hair. Fortunately, Peppino was eating alone. Many of the tavern’s other customers had clustered around a game of dice going on around a scaldino in the opposite corner. Good. Their exclamations would cover our conversation if we kept it low.
Peppino and I passed some casual talk concerning his current fortunes—as well as those of Maurino, Torani’s valet—and then I announced the purpose of my visit. The gondolier replied with a scowl, but I hadn’t forgotten Maurino’s advice on how to loosen his tongue. Peppino’s fierce expression turned to a smile when I ordered a bottle of the tavern keeper’s best Montepulciano.
“Now,” I repeated, “tell me what you know about Niccolo Rocatti.”
“Would he be a well-set-up young man who teaches the orphan misses at the Pieta how to make music?”
I nodded. “The very same. Did he and Maestro Torani ever meet?”
“Several times my master had me row to a landing near the Pieta. This Rocatti would be waiting for us with his toes hanging over the water—he practically jumped in the boat.”
“When did these meetings occur?”
He pushed his lower lip up. “It was hot. Whenever I stopped the boat, the mosquitoes ate me alive.”
“Back in the summer, then.”
Peppino nodded indifferently, his gaze glued to the keeper who was sauntering over with a tray.
“Look here, man,” I said sharply. “How many times did you carry your master to this landing?”
Peppino opened his mouth, but kept silent as the keeper thudded an uncorked bottle and two flat-bottomed cups of thick glass on the oak table. I turned mine over, then poured a purple-red stream of Montepulciano into the other. Peppino would have the entire thing—if he cooperated.
The gondolier understood. He thought for a moment before replying, “Three times I remember for certain—could’ve been four.”
“Where did you take Maestro Torani and Signor Rocatti?”
“Nowhere. And everywhere.” He took a clumsy gulp of wine, then used the end of his napkin to wipe a purple dribble from his long chin. “Sometimes we went up and down the canals, but mostly my master ordered me out on the lagoon to follow the tides while he conducted his business.”
“And what business was that?”
“Can’t say.” He covered his glass with a reddened fist, as if he feared I would snatch it away. His tone grew aggrieved. “How could I say? His business weren’t none of mine. And besides, my master had me cover the boat—as if it were November weather—and he pulled the curtains tight.”
Peppino, like any boatman of Venice, provided more than transportation to and fro. Throughout our island pleasure palace, gondoliers made the perfect go-betweens. Just as they knew all the canals’ twists and turns, all the hidden stairs and locked doors, and every conniving ladies’ maid, they were also excellent judges of character. An experienced gondolier could read a man’s appetites and inclinations at twenty paces. Peppino had more to tell me—if the wine hadn’t robbed his memory.
I leaned forward. “I want you to think back to these summer meetings—describe Rocatti’s demeanor.”
He lowered his glass with a puzzled gaze. “Eh?”
I simplified. “Was Rocatti lighthearted and agreeable? Argumentative? Pleading?”
Peppino shook his head. “None o’ that. The man was tickled, like my master wanted to make him a nice present. But he was scared, too, like he knew that present would cost him dear in the end.”
I felt my backbone wilting. A sigh tore itself from the depths of my lungs. It was just as I’d thought. My chance meeting with Rocatti at the Ghetto concert—the lengthy discussion of operas with Torani on the Rialto—my mission to convince the Savio that The False Duke should open the season. It had all been a grand deception—Maestro Torani’s grand spectacle of deception—with me as its unwitting dupe.
Yes, maestro, I thought. You surely do have much to reproach yourself with.
One crucial detail floated to the surface of the bubbling, confused stew of my mind. “Peppino,” I asked. “Did Signor Rocatti always wear his wig when you collected him at the landing?”
Soup forgotten, the boatman sucked down a noisy gulp of wine, then sat back and crossed his arms with glass still
in hand. “There was that one time my master insisted on rowing to the Pieta while the sun still had its arse in the lagoon. Rocatti was waiting for us, but he looked like he’d just rolled out of his bed and into his breeches. His hair was loose and flying every which way.”
“What color was that hair?” I asked on a tight breath.
“Red.” Peppino jerked his long chin towards the corner. “Orangey-red like the coals in yon scaldino.”
I managed a weary grin. That was also just as I’d thought. My ghost of an idea was taking on solid form.
***
A breathless ten-minute walk took me to the Rialto where maskers and merchants churned in a merrily roiling crowd at both ends of the bridge. On the canal, a water-borne barrel organ was cranking out a tune I recognized from an opera I’d sung several years ago—a magnificent aria now reduced to drivel. I shouldered my way onto the stone span with shops centered along its spine. One lone constable was attempting to maintain orderly passage, but not succeeding very well. As I climbed the ramp, my heart seemed to have swollen to twice its normal size, but its frantic pounding had subsided by the time I’d gained admittance to a familiar office in the nearby guard house.
“But, Andrea, don’t you see?” I pounded a fist on Messer Grande’s oaken desk. “Niccolo Rocatti is Vivaldi’s son.”
The chief constable stood at an unshuttered window that overlooked a canal filled with brisk traffic. The sun of the morning had given way to lowering gray skies. The Sirocco wasn’t finished with us yet. Though Andrea’s gaze was directed elsewhere, I knew that he’d been listening closely. He held his hands behind his back, his fingers tapping anxiously against each other, as I pelted him with my suspicions. Now he turned. “Are you saying that because Rocatti has red hair, he must be the son of The Red Priest?”
“That’s only a small part of it,” I responded impatiently.
“Venice is known for its redheads,” Andrea continued dryly. He came away from the window and paced his office, hands still joined behind his back. “Besides our Titian-haired whores who can gather a crowd of foreigners by simply brushing their tresses on their balconies, there’s ten ginger-topped urchins on every campo. But that is not what you want to hear, of course.” He aimed a sharp glance at me. “You should be at home, you know. You don’t look well.”
“I’m fine.” In fact, my strength was flagging and my head felt as if it might burst at any moment, but I couldn’t run back to the Cannaregio with my tail tucked between my legs. I was on the verge of untangling the knotty skein of hidden motives and half-truths that surrounded Torani’s murder. I continued wearily, “I’ve probably not been making much sense. Let me lay my theory out, point by point.”
“At least sit.” Andrea gestured to a wooden armchair and further encouraged me by taking his own seat behind his desk.
“Yes. All right.” I sank down, thinking carefully. To make my case to this man of law, I must begin at the beginning, but whose beginning? Rocatti’s? Signora Passoni’s? I decided to start with what I had personally observed.
“On the day I visited the Ca’Passoni to secure the Savio’s permission to mount The False Duke, Franco approached me in an empty corridor. His manner was oddly secretive, and he pressed a purse of coins on me. ‘For the success of the new opera,’ he said. He was merely acting as Signora Passoni’s messenger, of course. But why was the signora so keen to support Rocatti’s opera? She’d never before displayed any particular interest in the politics of the opera house. I confess this little mystery slipped my mind during the whirlwind journey to Milan.”
Andrea lifted a forefinger. “A journey forced on you by Signorina Beatrice’s nascent longing to hear Angeletto—such are the whims of young girls with powerful fathers. They can overturn the best-laid plans, change the course of history, topple empires…”
“Yes, I suppose that is so.” I twisted on the hard chair. I would do much better if Andrea could refrain from interrupting me with his philosophical digressions. “It wasn’t until the reception for the two singers that I understood why Signora Passoni was so invested in The False Duke’s success. At least I thought I understood—when I observed the obvious warmth between her and Rocatti. I pegged the violin master as her lover, an ambitious young man courting an older woman in a position to advance his career. And she…well, the signora is like many women of her class—ignored by her husband, with time hanging heavily on her hands. But I was wrong.” I allowed myself an indulgent chuckle. “Signora Passoni and Rocatti are not lovers—they are mother and son. The tie that binds them is Maestro Antonio Vivaldi.”
Andrea rewarded me with a congratulatory nod. “Good thinking, Tito. You may well be correct. Though the Savio would like to forget his wife’s unfortunate origins—indeed, he’s taken pains to suppress any talk of it—it is common knowledge that Giovanna Passoni was raised at the Pieta. She came of age during Vivaldi’s early tenure there.” He grinned. “You didn’t know?”
I shook my head. Messer Grande’s definition of common knowledge stretched much farther than mine. “What was Signora Passoni’s maiden name?”
“Bragadin.”
I rubbed my aching brow. He’d named a noble family of great antiquity, whose tree had produced so many branches that only the clerks at the office of the Golden Book could sort them out with any degree of accuracy. Venice had never elevated a Bragadin to the Doge’s throne, but many men of that family had served as Senators, Savii, and Procurators. And as every schoolchild knows, our Republic’s most celebrated hero of the prolonged Turkish wars was the ill-fated Marcantonio Bragadin. For these reasons, I supposed, the Savio had found Bragadin blood worthy of matrimony, even when it flowed through the veins of a bastard daughter. Still, a marriage to a Pieta so-called orphan was not an exceptionally proud match, and if that orphan had already produced her own bastard child, it would be outright scandalous.
Andrea went on, “The signora’s wastrel father, Julio Bragadin, tended his inherited seat on the Great Council but not much else. From age sixteen on, he had a string of mistresses and concentrated on a life of pleasure, not business. Julio met an early death, but not before depositing a goodly sum in the Pieta’s coffers to be used as his daughter’s dowry.” Then, after a pause: “Her mother isn’t known.”
It struck me that I was laboring over already plowed ground. I asked, “Is it also common knowledge that Giovanna Passoni gave birth to a son before she married the Savio?”
“In short, no—that is mere speculation. At seventeen, she left the shelter of the Pieta for the Ca’Passoni. I’ve unearthed no witnesses to a pregnancy. No gossip, even.” He rearranged the items on his desk with ferocity, as if the ink pots and blotters were personally responsible for this lack of evidence. “If she did—by some miracle—manage to carry off a secret childbirth at the Pieta, it can’t be proven. No one knows a thing.”
“Rocatti knows, I’ll be bound.” I rolled my eyes toward the window that had become a misty gray rectangle and heaved an exasperated sigh. The weather irritated me. My ailing body irritated me. Venice irritated me. “What have you discovered about Rocatti’s early life? Where was he raised?”
“As a boy, he lived on a campo near the Pieta, with an elderly couple he called Zio and Zia.”
Uncle and Aunt, my left foot. “Paid caretakers,” I said bluntly. “Have you questioned them?”
He shrugged. “They died several years ago, just weeks apart.”
“How very convenient.”
“Tito.” Andrea left his desk and came to lean over my chair with one hand on the back. With the other he rubbed his bluish jaw. He drew his eyebrows together in a tight furrow. “You obviously believe that this supposed relationship formed a basis for Torani’s murder—”
“He knew! Torani knew that Vivaldi was her lover!” My vehement croak overrode his measured tones. “You know that the maestro could wield a vicious sense of humor. He was teas
ing Signora Passoni when he asked if she hadn’t heard the whispers of Vivaldi in Oriana’s songs.”
Andrea straightened. “If I recall aright, Signora Passoni took Torani’s comment as an insult.”
“Precisely so!” I jumped up to face him eye-to-eye. “She left the salon, dropping her bag in her haste. I scooped it up and returned it to Franco.” I laid a hand on Messer Grande’s shoulder. “Andrea, that bag was as heavy as if it had been filled with lead shot.”
His eyes widened in surprise. Finally I had told him something he didn’t already know. He asked, “Was it heavy enough to break Torani’s skull?”
“In the right person’s hand.”
“Not Giovanna Passoni’s hand—I judge her head cool enough to carry out such a deed, but her slender arm encompasses no more muscle than a cabbage.”
“I’m speaking of Franco’s hand.” I fell silent, allowing the name to hover in the small space between us. The castrato’s elongated frame defied the ideal male physique, but I would wager that his strength was adequate to the task of coshing an old man’s skull with a weighted bag. Mine certainly was.
I continued, “Angeletto told me that Franco and Rocatti left the theater together yesterday afternoon—at the perfect time to allow Franco to appear at my door and place the angel card under my door knocker.”
Andrea didn’t even blink. “You’re right about that,” he said. “My men found someone who spotted Franco at your door.”
I sighed. I was again telling Andrea something he’d discovered on his own.
Perhaps this next would impress him, I thought, as I set about adding flesh to my ghost of an idea. “Let’s say that Giovanna Passoni had Vivaldi’s manuscript for The False Duke in her possession—precisely how doesn’t matter now. She knows her son is hardly the equal of his father where composition is concerned, nevertheless she is determined to propel him to a brilliant career rather than allow him to labor unrecognized. She strikes a bargain with Maestro Torani—he will present The False Duke as a brand-new opera by Niccolo Rocatti and—”
Whispers of Vivaldi Page 24