Whispers of Vivaldi (Tito Amato Series)

by Beverle Graves Myers

  Marshaling the entire force of my lungs, I bellowed for help. Perhaps someone would hear. That slender hope evaporated as manic laughter rang out over the music.

  I could expect no rescue. Balbi had clearly tricked me to the theater with the purported note from Angeletto, and I’d tossed that note away where no one at home would find it. As for Angeletto, she was probably resting in her family’s quarters at the Ca’Passoni, totally unaware of being used as bait.

  It was just me and Balbi, then, and I had to figure out what to do fast. The harpsichord had fallen silent and the musician was climbing the stairs to the stage. From the corner of my eye, I saw him scurry across the stage and pass behind the ship, then I heard him climbing up the steep ramp to the deck.

  I would not have recognized the man who came to stand before me. The round head that usually bobbed so genially was shaking with anger. The once gentle eyes glittered with liquid hatred, and deep-cut lines etched his brow. Balbi seemed to have gone mad.

  Or been possessed by something not quite human.

  Though his melody had hinted at the source of his torment, I decided to appeal to our shared past. I panted out, “Balbi. Giuseppe. Why are you doing this? I’m your friend, Tito. We’ve made music together for many years.”

  He’d been holding something behind his back. Without a word, he whipped his arm around and shook a long-bladed stiletto just inches from my face. Then he retreated a step. Still silent, he ripped my linen shirt wide open, exposing my chest, and with focused intensity, used his blade to etch a vicious path along the base of my right rib cage.

  I couldn’t help from crying out. Blood streamed down my flank, tears of pain down my cheeks.

  His voice erupted like Vesuvius. “Be silent, coward! You are not my friend—you’re a vile, sneaking reptile. All along it was you who scuttled my opera. You—you—you! I thought Maestro Torani had thrust Prometheus aside for The False Duke. But now I know the truth. You treated my masterpiece—the labor of years, the treasure of my heart—like a load of refuse.”

  “No, no,” I cried on a gasp. “I only meant for Maestro Torani to postpone Prometheus until later in the season. I admire your composition. It’s just that for Carnival we needed something revolutionary to fill the theater. The San Marco was in danger of losing Senate support.”

  “I know all about that.” His mud-colored eyes never left mine. His tongue flicked around damp lips. “My Prometheus was the perfect opera to save the theater—but you ruined everything—you replaced it with Rocatti’s drivel.” The blade pricked my skin once more.

  “No, Rocatti didn’t write The False Duke. It was composed by Antonio Vivaldi…when he was a young man.” At least I managed to surprise my tormentor into dropping his blade. I heard it hit the deck boards.

  “You’re lying.”

  “It’s no lie—I’ve seen the original manuscript with Vivaldi’s signature.”

  “Then why does Niccolo Rocatti take credit for it?”

  I groaned. “It’s a long story with many twists and turns. Untie me and I’ll explain.” Noting a flicker of indecision in his expression, I ventured a feeble smile. “There’s no shame in being temporarily supplanted by Venice’s revered maestro. Who could hope to top Vivaldi, after all?”

  Balbi stooped to retrieve the stiletto. Had the mention of Vivaldi saved my bacon? It was a bare possibility. And short-lived.

  As he straightened, Balbi made a sudden lunge and lodged the blade’s point under my breast bone. Tensing my abdomen, I shrank back as much as I was able. “I don’t care who wrote the foul thing,” he growled. “Maestro Vivaldi had his time in the sun. My turn had arrived. Prometheus would have pushed me to the pinnacle of success—if not for you.”

  I cried out as the knife point pierced my skin. Then, in desperation: “Dio mio, do you mean to murder me as well as Maestro Torani?”

  Balbi drew back. Blood—my blood—stained his blade. Yet the violinist sent me a wounded look and challenged me accusingly, “You believe I killed the maestro?”

  “Why not?” I shouted hoarsely. “If you once believed Torani cancelled your precious opera? For all I know you overheard his insulting comments at the reception—you’d come back to the salon from the kitchen by the time he praised The False Duke as a musical feast and disparaged Prometheus as gruel. An hour later, he was dead.”

  Balbi’s eyes narrowed to slits. He asked in a broken whisper, “Maestro Torani called my opera…gruel?”

  I nodded hesitatingly, now certain that he hadn’t heard Torani spouting off. Not even a trained actor could have faked that look of heartrending disillusionment and dismay.

  “I didn’t kill the maestro.” Balbi rubbed his brow like a man with a mounting fever. “Every day while I led the orchestra in rehearsing The False Duke, I held my tongue. Though every aria was like a dagger in my heart, I screwed my patience to the sticking point, determined to do my duty. I’ve murdered no one—until now.”

  “Now…” My voice trembled. I was growing weak, fuzzy-

  headed.

  “Now. Yes.” He lowered his hand and drew himself up. He addressed me smoothly, as if we were discussing nothing more serious than the proper phrasing of a musical passage. “I’m tired of playing other men’s inferior compositions—tired of waiting for Prometheus to be recognized for what it is—finished with being taken for granted. Good old Balbi! Yes, I’ve heard you call me thus. Well, good old Balbi is going to cut out your liver. Just as the impertinent Prometheus had his liver pecked out by a giant eagle, my little darling”—he waved the blade triumphantly—“will return again and again to peck at your side. While you bleed to death, you may listen to my glorious opera and think on what a fool you were to thwart my life’s work.”

  “Balbi, you must listen—Prometheus stole fire from the gods on Mt. Olympus, but I’ve done nothing—nothing except try to take care of the Teatro San Marco as best I could. For the love of God, man, I don’t deserve this.”

  His face hardened. He gazed at me with the cold eyes of a madman. “You deserve nothing less.”

  After delivering another painful jab to my side, Balbi scrambled off the deck, trotted across the stage, and made his way back down to the harpsichord where he clawed at the instrument like a rabid animal. Somewhere in that clash of notes was an aria from Prometheus.

  I hung my head. Beads of sweat ran down my face, joining my tears. My heart hammered against my ribs. Shivering from the pain spreading throughout my midsection, I wondered how I could have missed the simmering anger and resentment that had transformed this mild man into a savage. I also wondered how long it would be before Balbi worked himself up to deliver the mortal cut. He had deceived me utterly, and I had no way of predicting how long my torture would last. I was helpless.

  Or was I? Out of empty air, near my ear, Liya’s calm voice seemed to speak: “Hold on, my love. There is a way out of any predicament, if you have the courage to find it.”

  Liya! And Titolino! If I couldn’t manage to save myself, I would never see my family again.

  I forced myself to put the pain aside and take measured, if not deep, breaths. Take stock, I told myself. As long as Balbi is at the keyboard, you’re safe.

  All right. I was secured to a ship’s wheel at a very uncomfortable angle. I’d tried to wiggle free, tried to pick at the knots, but Balbi had bound me too tightly. The question of precisely how the slight violinist had accomplished that—indeed, how he had managed to drag me up the steep ramp at the rear of this set piece—flashed through my mind. It was quickly replaced by the memory of Aldo demonstrating how the deck split in half during the great shipwreck. I was actually draped over the wheel that controlled the mechanism. If I could set it into action the next time Balbi came on deck, the little man would be dashed to the…

  My blood froze. The music had stopped.

  Panicked, I stretched and clawed until my right
hand closed around a stout spoke. My left hand couldn’t make the connection, but I was able to press my left shoulder blade onto a protruding knob.

  But what was the correct sequence? One notch right and two left? Or was it the reverse? I was exhausted, burning with pain, unable to decide.

  The ramp’s crossties creaked. Balbi was coming, and I had to act one way or the other. Placing my fate in the hands of the Blessed Mother, I pushed and pulled, cranking the stubborn wheel to the right until I felt it catch.

  A swell of triumph swept through me.

  As Balbi passed through the gate in the ship’s railing, I shifted my weight, pushing to the left. The mechanism refused to budge. The violinist drew closer, staring at the stiletto in his hand, muttering under his breath. With an agonizing effort, I coaxed a trace of movement from the wheel.

  Still Balbi advanced, one deliberate step after the other, intent on his insane purpose—until he stopped and stood stock still, staring upwards. We’d both heard his name sounding in a disembodied, rumbling basso—Balbi.

  My head jerked around. Someone else was in the theater—up on the catwalk above the stage. Of course, I should have realized it at once. The small-statured Balbi could not have accomplished moving my deadweight onto the deck.

  I peered into the shadows overhead but saw only dangling ropes, hanging scenery, and crisscrossing platforms. “Who’s there?” I cried. “Show yourself.”

  The response was a pistol shot that whizzed across the deck.

  I watched in horror as Giuseppe Balbi stiffened, his face set in the classical mask of tragedy. Blood trickled from a round hole in his forehead. He teetered, then collapsed near the ship’s mast with a crash. I felt the boards quiver through my toes.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  A menacing silence filled the seconds following the shot. I craned my neck, frantically searching for Balbi’s killer. Nothing! Then, a blur of movement caught my eye from the opposite direction, from the auditorium I’d thought was empty. A slim female form in a pink gown appeared at the railing of a second-tier box. She began to applaud—a thin sound in the yawning cavern of the Teatro San Marco.

  “That was wonderful,” she called. “You took care of Balbi—now it’s Tito Amato’s turn.” Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to see Beatrice Passoni standing in her family’s box, though it did shock me that her voice was so exhilarated, so unbelievably merry, as if she were watching Punch-and-Judy antics instead of an actual murder. She went on, “Shoot Tito, too, Papa.”

  Papa. The Savio.

  He was coming. I could hear him. My stomach twisted in nauseating panic.

  “Carrissima, you forget…” the Savio’s senatorial voice boomed out from stage left. He had descended the ladder from the catwalk. “These deaths must be made to look as if one man murdered the other.”

  I wasted no time in pondering how the Savio meant to kill me and why. I tensed in anticipation of making the final push that would awake the sleeping giant under the ship, the machinery that would lift the deck and split it in two. If Signor Passoni was incapacitated in the resulting fall, I would have only his daughter to contend with. It would take Beatrice a few minutes to make her way from the box to the stage. Perhaps by then, I could think of something else.

  Striving to control my terror, I leaned into the wheel with all my strength. Thank the Holy Madonna, it yielded and advanced one notch to the left just as the Savio reached the deck. Hoping to convince my new assailant that he had nothing to fear from me, I then slumped as if my strength were totally spent.

  From under half-closed eyelids, I watched as he went straight to Balbi’s prone form. Sweeping his long cloak aside, the Savio knelt and removed the stiletto from the violinist’s flaccid hand. My heart was beating as if it would tear through my chest. I strove to calm it as the Savio came to loom up before me, stretching every inch of his noble height.

  “Poor Tito.” He shook his head pityingly, an aristocrat of the first order giving alms to a scabrous beggar. “What an ignominious end for a renowned singer—killed in a tragic wrangle with a vengeful composer. Your rejection of Prometheus drove Balbi mad, you see. He lured you to the theater and attacked you in a semblance of his operatic hero’s cruel death. Such is the fury of a patient man—it grows unseen like the roots of a tree, digging at a man’s soul, strangling his better nature, until it bursts forth in uncontrollable rage.”

  The Savio smiled, baring every tooth. May I never again see such an unnerving sight!

  Dimly I heard him continue, “It may cheer you to know that the world will believe you fought back. You courageously overcame and shot Balbi before your own loss of blood felled you.”

  Despite my intent to appear defeated, I glowered. I couldn’t help it. “Are Torani and Tedi on your list of victims as well?”

  His smile faded. “Regrettably, yes…but I believe Balbi’s final mad act will convince Messer Grande that he killed Torani for the same reason that he killed you.”

  “And Tedi?”

  “Well, let’s say that she guessed Balbi killed her lover, and thus he felt compelled to silence her. That makes logical sense, doesn’t it?” Passoni gazed at the stiletto point and touched it with a fingertip as if to test its sharpness. He continued meditatively, “Or perhaps Tedi incurred Balbi’s wrath by arguing against the production of his chef-d’œuvre. Where a lunatic is concerned, there’s no lack of possible motivations.”

  “You manipulated Balbi, drove him around the bend.” With a start, I realized I’d already forgiven the little violinist. His mind had been poisoned by a greater evil.

  “It was pathetically easy to turn Balbi to my will—after I’d convinced him that Torani left the choice of opera entirely in your hands, and that you chose The False Duke over Prometheus. I told Balbi that when you came to me to request permission, you called him a hack, the worst sort of amateur composer—”

  “That’s enough. I see,” I spat out. Sweat ran down my brow, stinging my eyes. I knew I must conserve my strength for the wheel’s final turn, but I had to know the truth. I raised my chin and asked, “But why did you kill Maestro Torani in the first place?”

  Beatrice shouted from the auditorium, “Watch him, Papa. Tito is a crafty one—he might have a trick up his sleeve.”

  The Savio turned his handsome profile toward his daughter. “Don’t worry, my pet. Tito is completely in my power.”

  “Then what are you waiting for? Do it!” Though the girl was merely a blur of pink across the blazing footlights and the dark space beyond, I could envision her moody pout.

  The Savio turned back and made a shallow bow, one precisely befitting my station. He was a consummate patrician, all right. He knew Venice and her customs through and through. No wonder he had risen so far. Now he was saying, “You really don’t understand—after all the time you’ve spent poking your long nose where it has no right to be.”

  I shook my head.

  “It came down to this. Rinaldo Torani was a thoroughly feckless punter. As was his failing, he played one card too many.” He lifted an eyebrow. “I was surprised to see the old man toddle into the palazzo on the night of Angeletto’s reception, but since he had made the effort to attend, I asked him to meet me in the card room. I had bad news, and it seemed churlish to deliver it before the assembled company.”

  “Bad news?”

  “Yes. Lorenzo Caprioli had also turned up unexpectedly…anxious to gauge his prospects regarding the Senate’s support for his theater, I presume. Can’t stand the fellow; he’s an ass who considers himself an Arabian steed. But Caprioli did make me a most attractive proposition. If I were able to persuade the Senate to change its official backing from the Teatro San Marco to the Teatro Grimani, I could call the shots on any scenic illusion I desired.” He spread his hands, looked around with a satisfied smile. “This shipwreck would be nothing—a mere trifle. I could order Caprioli’s machinist to
create a hot air balloon ascent from the stage, a raging naval battle, even the sulphur pits and burning lakes of Hell itself. No spectacle would be too great. How could I refuse?”

  “You told Maestro Torani you were planning to support the Teatro Grimani over the San Marco,” I whispered, imagining the ire and frustration my old mentor must have felt. I could just see him arguing with the Savio, snatching off his wig and throwing it across the card room.

  “Yes, and Torani made the mistake of trying to coerce me into changing my mind. He thought he held a trump card.” Half-closing his lids, the Savio glanced toward the box where Beatrice kept watch. “Somehow the old maestro had found out about certain…attentions that Girolamo Grillo was paying my daughter. Torani had an eyewitness who could describe one of their trysts. You couldn’t name the man he spoke of, perchance?”

  Peppino or one of his fellow gondoliers was my best guess, but I’d die before I’d mention the boatman’s name to the Savio.

  “No,” he mused, “I don’t suppose you could.” The Savio rubbed his hands together and raised his voice in something close to disbelief. “Torani actually threatened me—if I didn’t continue to support the Teatro San Marco with the Senate, he would turn his anonymous meddler loose in the coffee houses.” The Savio’s voice became gravelly. “You know what that would mean for Beatrice. The good families would turn their backs on her. Her brilliant prospects would be ruined.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you’d killed Grillo, but…” I shook my head in sorrow. “Was murdering Maestro Torani—the man who’d devoted his entire life to Venice’s pleasure—was that the only way to protect your daughter’s honor?”

  “It was the surest way,” he answered shortly. “Everyone who has the potential to harm my Beatrice must be removed. Believe me, if Grillo ever again sets foot on Venetian soil, he’ll be dead within twenty-four hours.”