Mozart’s Blood

by Louise Marley

  Octavia, grateful for not being thirsty for the moment, accepted a glass of champagne, but held it without drinking. Russell stayed at her elbow, reliving moments of the performance.

  “The ‘Non mi dir’ went particularly well, I thought,” he said. He rubbed the stem of his glass with nervous fingers. “But perhaps we could speak to Nick about the first ensemble. I still would like the tempo to be flexible there.”

  “I was watching you,” Octavia said, and smiled as Russell rolled his eyes.

  “I know you were,” he said, and then, as Nick approached them, he stopped.

  “Great show,” Nick said heartily.

  “Yes, very good,” Russell answered. “I hope it will go as well with the other cast.”

  “We all do,” the baritone said, making an expansive gesture with his glass. “So what’s your next engagement, Octavia?”

  “After this run, I have a Figaro in Houston. The Countess.”

  “Oh, good, good.”

  “And you?” she asked politely.

  He answered, with a little swelling of his chest, “I’ve just heard from my management. Another Giovanni, this one in Chicago.”

  Octavia said, “That’s very short notice. Is someone ill?”

  “He had terrible notices in Seattle. They cancelled his contract.”

  “Really!” Russell raised his eyebrows and asked for more details about the event. Octavia gave the conversation half her attention, letting her eyes stray idly around the room. When her gaze reached the doorway, she stiffened.

  A woman in a long black lace dress stood there, surveying the room through tinted lenses. She was rather tall, narrow-shouldered, with a hawkish nose and a tight black chignon. She scanned the room steadily until her dark gaze alighted upon Octavia. She began to work her way through the room without hesitation.

  Zdenka Milosch.

  Octavia froze for a long moment. There was a door behind her that she was fairly certain led to the kitchen, but there was little point in using it. If the Countess Milosch meant to talk to her, such evasion would merely be postponing the inevitable. She sighed and set her glass down on a nearby table.

  She murmured, “Russell, will you excuse me? I see an old friend.” With a nod to Nick, she turned toward the door. Her jaw was clenched, and she deliberately loosened it as she wound her way through the crush. The Countess came forward, too. They met in the middle of the room.

  Zdenka Milosch put her cold hand on Octavia’s arm to steer her to an empty corner. When she was certain no one was watching them, Octavia shook her arm free. She was careful to keep her face impassive, but her voice was bitter. “What are you doing here? I thought we had an agreement.”

  “So did I,” the Countess said. Her voice was like shards of ice. Octavia felt a chill on her arm where she had touched her. “You broke it.”

  “It was necessary.” Octavia met the Countess’s stony gaze with one just as hard.

  “She was not worthy to be one of us.”

  “That street girl?” Octavia remembered the girl crying out, “What was that?” and a wave of nausea made her swallow. She tried to keep all feeling from her voice, emulating the Countess. “She may not survive in any case,” she said.

  “She survived,” the Countess said, in an offhand tone. “For a while.”

  Octavia’s heart lurched. She stared at Zdenka Milosch for a long, awful moment, trying to absorb her meaning. In a voice that shook with fury, she finally said, “You killed her.”

  With the faintest curl of her lip, the Countess answered, “It was necessary.”

  Octavia pulled back a step, as if she could no longer bear the proximity with Zdenka Milosch. The memories of the street girl filled her mind, nearly blinding her for a moment. There had been a little brother, who died of some illness, and an inconsolable mother. There was a grandmother, cooking in a small, dark kitchen, smiling across a bowl of pasta. There was a teacher who took advantage, under the guise of sympathy…a screaming argument with a father, a family fractured, a home lost….

  With a supreme effort, Octavia shoved these memories aside, walled them off. She glared at the Countess, her body vibrating with impotent fury. “I can’t talk to you here,” she said. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  And as if he felt her distress, Massimo Luca appeared at her side. She managed to smile up at him, though she still trembled with anger.

  If he noticed, he gave no sign. He bent to kiss her cheek. “You were fabulous,” he said.

  “You had a great ovation yourself,” she answered. “And you earned it.”

  “Grazie.” He glanced at the Countess and nodded politely. “Did you enjoy the opera?”

  She stared at him without answering, until Octavia said hurriedly, “This is my—the Countess Milosch, from Prague. Massimo Luca, our Masetto.”

  Massimo grinned at the Countess’s indifferent silence and turned a dismissive shoulder to her. To Octavia, he said, “Not a fan, I gather. But I came to ask if I can drive you home.”

  “Yes,” she said instantly.

  “No,” the Countess said at the same moment.

  Massimo’s brows rose, and Octavia touched his hand. “Massimo, a moment, please? I’ll meet you…over there, where Russell is standing. Five minutes.”

  He turned his hand to caress her fingers. “Va bene. Five minutes.”

  When he was gone, Octavia said bluntly, “Ugo is missing.”

  The Countess’s eyelids flickered. “Missing? How can he be missing?”

  Octavia gave an exasperated sigh. It was useless, she supposed, to comment on the stupidity of the question. She said only, “He disappeared our first night in Milan.” Anxiety welled anew in her throat, and she had to drop her eyes. She dared not show weakness in the presence of Zdenka Milosch. The network of La Società was complex, and Ugo was not their only resource. Their creatures went armed with wicked little knives, and they knew how—and where—to use them.

  “No word?” Zdenka said.

  “None.” Octavia regained control and lifted her head.

  Zdenka’s lips curled in the barest of smiles. “You can come home with me.”

  “No, I can’t. I’m under contract, and I have another performance in three days.”

  The black eyes narrowed. “What do I care about that?”

  Octavia felt her cheeks warm, and she seized the Countess’s arm, relishing the faint wince at the strength of her fingers. She hissed, “Listen to me, Zdenka. You knew I was a singer when you began all this. I have a right to live the way I like, just as you and those walking corpses do at the compound!”

  The Countess’s upper lip lifted, slid up just enough to give Octavia a glimpse of her fearsome teeth. “You would have been dead two centuries ago if it weren’t for the gift of the bite, Teresa! My bite!”

  “But I’m not dead. And I am what you made me.” Octavia dropped the Countess’s arm and glanced across the room to where Massimo stood smiling down into the eager face of Marie Charles. “Go back to the compound,” she said in a hard voice. “Go now. And don’t come near me again.”

  “No more conversions, Octavia. This is our last warning.”

  “You would rather see me die?”

  “If necessary.” The Countess’s lip released, and her face settled into its customary mask. “Surely, my dear, you don’t expect me to have an attack of conscience at this late date?”

  “No. I know your loyalties are reserved for the elders.” Octavia couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice. The elders had offered her neither sympathy nor friendship. To them, she was only a vessel.

  Zdenka Milosch appeared not to notice her tone, or not to care. She gathered her shawl around her, preparing to leave, and fixed Octavia with her hooded gaze. “We will not admit any more to our number, not without very good reason. The risk of exposure is too great.”

  “What do you expect me to do?” Octavia nearly snarled the words. She saw Massimo bend down to hear Marie say something and then toss back
his errant lock of hair as he laughed.

  “You know perfectly well what we expect,” Zdenka said. She turned toward the door, adding over her shoulder, “If you must feed, kill.”

  Octavia forced a pleasant expression to her face as she turned back to the party, but her nerves vibrated with rage. The face of the little street girl danced before her, and her stomach turned. She had no illusions about the nature of the world. Predator and prey. Winners and losers. The conquerors and the vanquished. She had been naïve to think she could compromise, that she could take what she needed without paying the full price. It seemed, after all, that there was not enough blood in the world to go around.

  She had once more to face the war that raged in her soul, if she still possessed such a thing. It was a great battle waged between the artist struggling to survive and the human being longing to be restored. To surrender would be to lose her music, to lose her deepest desire. But to continue was to give up on the last shreds of her humanity.

  A waiter was passing, and she seized a fresh glass of champagne. She had almost drunk it all when she felt Massimo’s warmth behind her, his hand slipping around her waist in a gesture of familiarity, of confidence. She turned to look up at him, her body still throbbing under the tide of emotion.

  His eyes widened. “Octavia?”

  She took a swift breath and drank off the rest of the wine. “Can we get out of here?” she asked in an undertone. “Have we stayed long enough to be polite?”

  Massimo took the empty glass and set it on the buffet table. “Yes,” he said, with a husky edge to his deep voice. “We’ll just slip out. Where’s your coat?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  He grinned, and his eyes kindled with a conspiratorial light. “Good. I know where the back door is.”

  The staff of Ristorante Romani looked up as they passed through the kitchen, but no one interrupted them. The old Mercedes was parked in a nearby alley, and in moments they were safely inside, with the heater warming, the motor purring as Massimo drove expertly through the cramped and twisting streets. Octavia knew Milan, but Massimo knew side streets and hidden lanes she had never discovered.

  She forced herself to focus on his profile as he drove. It would do her no good to think about Zdenka Milosch anymore…or about the girl by the Dumpster. There was nothing she could do, nothing she could have done. She felt as she had in the beginning, when Teresa struggled against the thirst, slowly coming to understand what she had become.

  And she remembered Mozart’s refusal.

  Teresa Saporiti went back to Rauhensteingasse the next day and found Mozart a little stronger. Constanze whispered to her, “What did you do? What did you give him?”

  Teresa couldn’t meet her eyes. “I talked to him,” she said. “I told him how much we all care about him, how much we want to sing another opera.”

  Constanze seemed to think this was reasonable. But Mozart, though he was clearly better, his hands less swollen, his color stronger, would not speak to Teresa. He turned his head away on the pillow, and his curling hair hid his eyes. Constanze shrugged and shook her head. “I’m sorry, fräulein. He’s not himself yet.”

  Teresa nodded and excused herself. As she walked back to her lodging, she told herself it would be all right, that he had taken enough for the moment. One more day wouldn’t matter. She would go tomorrow, and again the next day, until he would listen, let her explain how important it was that he preserve himself, how great his gifts to the world could be.

  That night the thirst came on her, sooner than it should have. She had given Mozart so much, and her body demanded its return. With an unbearable burning in her throat, she slipped out into the night and wandered the streets of Vienna, hunting.

  She knew by then the sorts of taverns that were the natural habitat for her prey, and she found her way to one of these in the Kärntner Viertel, the southeast quarter. It was a ramshackle place, too rudimentary even to have a sign. Its uneven roof appeared to be made of scavenged tiles. It had three walls cobbled together with planks that didn’t match, and the city ramparts formed the back wall. The single door hung crazily in its frame, emitting a rectangle of lurid yellow light. Patrons toppled in and out like rodents from a rat hole.

  One presented himself to her like a gift, reeling out of the sulfurous glow of the tavern into the starlit night. He was a red-faced, big-bellied man reeking of beer and insensate with lust. The veins in his neck were swollen, and capillaries laced his fleshy nose. He seemed a man bursting with what she needed, and she barely restrained herself from sinking her teeth into him right there in the street. She managed to lead him to a shadowed place beneath a jutting support for the ramparts. He had time only to make a clumsy grab at her skirt before she fell on him.

  When she was finished, she left him propped against the ramparts and strolled back to her lodging. Sated, she fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep, and woke with a start when the winter sun was already high in a pale blue sky. She leaped out of bed and hurried to wash and dress her hair. The maid, hearing her moving about, offered coffee, but Teresa refused. She wanted to see Mozart. She wanted to show him how well she felt, how strong she was. She wanted to persuade him that he should seize his opportunity, as she had. That although their path had not been of their own choosing, and though they had lost any hope of heaven, there was still life, and there was music.

  She rehearsed all of this in her mind as she hurried once more to Rauhensteingasse. She had forgotten her hat, and the cold sunlight, reflecting from ice-glazed streets and snow-buried gardens, dazzled her eyes. She knocked on Mozart’s door. Someone opened it, but at first she couldn’t make out who it was. Half blinded, she stumbled forward.

  A hard small hand stopped her.

  Teresa said, “Excuse me. Frau Mozart?”

  It was a woman who answered, but it was not Constanze. “Weber,” she said sharply. “Frau Weber. You can’t come in now. This is a death house.”

  “No!” Teresa blinked, trying to see the woman who stood in her way. “No, I—listen to me, please!”

  The woman’s features began to come clear as her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the foyer. She was very like Constanze, though her hair was gray and her figure square and solid. “I’m sorry, fräulein. I wouldn’t have opened the door, but I thought you were the doctor.” She stepped back into the shadows and began to close the door.

  Teresa put out a hand to prevent her, saying swiftly, “Frau Weber. Are you Frau Mozart’s mother? I’m a friend of the family. Please tell Frau Mozart—Constanze—please tell her I’m here.”

  “She is at her husband’s bedside,” Frau Weber said. Her voice dropped. “He’s dying.”

  Teresa searched for something to say, anything that would make Frau Weber allow her to enter. As the door began to close again, she saw the older woman’s eyes well with tears. In a soft voice, Teresa said, “May I just pay my respects, gnädige Frau?”

  Frau Weber began to speak, but her voice caught in a sob, and she began to weep openly. Teresa instantly stepped forward. She pulled a handkerchief from her bag and pressed it into Frau Weber’s hands. Frau Weber buried her face in it, weeping, while Teresa closed the door on the brilliance outside.

  Someone had drawn all the curtains in the house, as if a death had already occurred. A mirror Teresa could just see in one of the ground-floor rooms had been covered with a swathe of dark fabric. She stood waiting while Frau Weber collected herself. When she led the way up the stairs, Teresa followed at a respectful distance.

  The door stood open to Mozart’s darkened room. Constanze knelt at the bedside, her husband’s swollen hand in hers. Several more people stood around the room in attitudes of sorrow, but Teresa barely saw them. She saw only Mozart.

  His face was like the wax of an old candle, gray and oddly shiny. His eyes were closed, and his breath whistled in his throat. Teresa stopped in the doorway and stood gazing at him as a feeling of hopelessness rose in her breast, nearly choking her. Hardly knowing
she did it, she breathed, “Oh, Wolfgang. Oh, no.”

  She felt, rather than saw, the attention of everyone in the room come to rest on her. Constanze got to her feet and came forward. “Signorina Saporiti. He’s given up!” she blurted in a rushed whisper. “He says he’s poisoned, he insists he’s dying. He won’t drink anything, he won’t see a priest…. Not even last rites! Can’t you do something?”

  Teresa stared over Constanze’s head at Mozart. His head lolled on the pillow, and the resurgence of color she had seen two days before was gone. He looked—the thought made her shudder—he looked like one of her victims, spent, drained of all life. She said hoarsely, “Constanze. Can I talk to him alone?”

  And Mozart’s wife, pitifully eager for any shred of hope, bustled about the bedroom, shooing everyone out, stopping at the door for one more longing look at her husband. She went out, closing the door behind her and leaving Teresa alone with Mozart.

  She approached the bed gingerly and sat beside him. As Constanze had done, she took his distended hand in hers. “Wolfgang,” she said, urgently. “Wolfgang, look at me.”

  His eyes didn’t open, but his upper lip lifted, showing her his teeth.

  “Yes, yes,” she said softly. “If that’s what you want. Anything you want! But look at me first, talk to me.”

  His eyelids fluttered and opened. His eyes, which she had known to be a mild brown, with a steady sparkle, were dark and angry. His voice was no more than a croak. “Poisoned.”

  “No,” she said. “No, changed. It’s not the same. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

  “Damned,” he said.

  She had begun to roll back her sleeve, to offer him her wrist once again, but she stopped with her cuff half undone. In a firmer voice, she said, “Perhaps, Wolfgang. Perhaps we are damned. But it wasn’t my choice, nor was it yours.”

  He coughed several times, with a hard, tearing sound. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, when he had caught his breath. “Choose now.”