The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  “But not enough,” Conrad muttered, where they sat at the back of the main rehearsal mine, passing a bottle.

  “It’s… not a bad opera,” Tullio offered. He took the bottle and drank in his turn. “In places it’s fucking spectacular. But there’s long patches where… none of it’s surprising, know what I mean? Patchwork Donizetti pretending to be Bellini, with a bit of Rossini crescendo thrown in.”

  Conrad winced. “We have eight days during which we can kick il Superbo’s backside and make him compose up to his full potential.”

  Tullio leaned one elbow on a music stand, and squinted up an upturned empty bottle.

  “No one knows how good their black opera is.” He gave the bottle up for empty and lowered it. “Padrone, you know, maybe this doesn’t have to be the best thing ever put on at the San Carlo—it just has to be a better opera than theirs.”

  “I disagree. We have this one chance. We have to make it the best that we possibly can.”

  Conrad put his head in his hands, raked his fingers across his scalp, and emerged energised but (he suspected) unkempt.

  “And even if that’s not the case—can we really risk everything on that chance?”

  With the end of the self-imposed deadline approaching, during frantic rehearsal, the only violence in the catacombs had come from Captain Alvarez’s regiment, and the Naples police officers detailed to assist them in guarding the opera rehearsals.

  And Tullio Rossi.

  And Luigi Esposito.

  It only came to Conrad by report, which caused him to curse himself for working so hard.

  “You should have seen it!” Isaura was all Paolo, seemingly oblivious as to why the police chief and the ex-soldier might be fighting. “Luigi put him on the floor without even getting his white gloves dirty! I thought Tullio was a soldier?”

  “Now I think about it, he’s been out of the army a few years.” Conrad shrugged. “Luigi’s the police chief of a rough district, and he came up through the ranks.”

  Which apparently Tullio didn’t know.

  Or that Luigi is a devious smart bugger who is not above brass knuckle-dusters.

  “We had a short discussion afterwards,” Tullio reported, when Conrad finally persuaded him to speak. “He admits I’ve got the right to first go, because I met her first. But he reserves the right to flirt.”

  “No, really?” Conrad stopped himself snickering.

  “I agreed. Because he can’t not, padrone; it would kill the ponce!”

  Conrad burst out laughing.

  The ex-soldier wandered off to Estella and Sandrine, to further contaminate the gossip-well at source, so that it wouldn’t be known what he and the police chief might have been fighting over.

  Conrad caught Roberto’s gaze across the rehearsal hall and found himself coming to unspoken agreement with the composer.

  They can wait one more day to be warned about the Prince’s Men; let them enjoy their freedom from it while they have it…

  There were still territorial and administrative differences between the police and the army. Conrad took care to be in the small catacomb he reserved as his study when scuffles occurred—usually late in the evening, after drink.

  “You leave me the hard work,” Luigi complained, coming in on Tuesday, the following morning, uninvited; throwing down his hat and gloves on a pile of femurs.

  “I leave it to the man who knows what to do!” Conrad cut short a gesture with his writing hand and still left a blot of ink on the end of Act IV scene 3. “If there’s another way into this part of the tunnels, you’re the man who knows about it. And your men, too. Not that I intend to hint anything about illegal gambling operations.”

  “Good.” Luigi raked his hand through his hair, looking rather less spruce when he had done. “What is it about rifles? You were in the army. Why do they immediately turn any man who carries them into a dumb brute?”

  “Don’t ask me. I was Horse, not Foot. Ask Captain Tullio. If you dare!” Conrad grinned at him. He wiped his pen clean on a cloth. “Any more snoopers?”

  “We’ve managed to successfully keep all intruders out of this area. There are still one or two men coming in to have a look at what’s going on—some are local criminal gangs, and a few are obviously hired men.”

  “Hired by the Prince’s Men?”

  Luigi Esposito elegantly shrugged. “One would imagine so. Either way, they haven’t got past the picket line, never mind the inner guards. I may think Fabrizio Alvarez wears the silliest hat this side of Catania, but he does know his job.”

  A yawning Tullio wandered in, evidently picking up the last words. In the spirit of his new truce with Luigi, he remarked, “You never saw padrone here in his cavalry helmet, did you? Now that was silly.”

  Conrad essayed plaintiveness. “I am sitting here…”

  “It had leopard-skin on it. And a crest, and a plume.”

  There was no use in attempting to defend the his Horse regiment; the Two Sicilies’ comic-opera uniforms were notorious throughout both the Allied and Northern armies, and the only adequate method of defence was a startlingly effective showing in battle.

  “Angelotti wants to see you,” Tullio added, after he and Luigi had mocked all they could think of regarding Alvarez’s soldiers.

  “Che cazzo…!” Conrad succumbed to the urge to put his head in his hands. He heard Luigi Esposito let loose his tenor laugh.

  “I wouldn’t have your job for all of the King’s treasury!”

  Conrad flipped through his notes, finding the instructions to the stagehands and construction crew. “Come in, Michele.”

  It was somewhat superfluous, since without a door to the stone study, men walked in and out much as they wished. The dusty blond figure of Michele Angelotti was no exception.

  Angelotti stepped forward and fixed his gaze on Conrad with more dignity than a man usually has when his hands and clothes are covered with Plaster of Paris. “Master Rossini he once told me, all impresarios are bald before they are thirty, from tearing out their hair. All masters of works crews in opera, they are bald before the age of twenty! From impresarios and scriptwriters asking the fucking impossible!”

  He spoke strongly accented Neapolitan, and unlike JohnJack Spinelli—who sang it well in one-act Neapolitan comedies—rarely used a purer Italian. On the occasions when Angelotti did, as with his last few words, his tenor voice penetrated clear to the back of the excavated mine, and echoed off down the dry aqueduct tunnels.

  Conrad managed to interrupt him. “Tullio, could you get us some more bread and wine? Michele, you’ll have breakfast with me while we talk?”

  Angelotti folded his arms over his leather apron, and then evidently realised that an ancient stone mine was not a boss’s drawing-room. He gave a curt nod.

  “Get enough for all of us?” Conrad dug in his pocket and handed Tullio a fistful of calli.

  “I’ll bargain ’em down!” Tullio vanished off into the lamp-lit gloom outside the chamber, heading for the archaic wooden steps that climbed to the bedroom of the baker’s family, in the Mercato district. The shaven-headed man automatically touched his forehead as he passed one of Alvarez’s officers.

  “We’ll only need one full staging rehearsal,” Conrad said optimistically.

  “Cazzo!” Angelotti worked himself up to full flood again. “You want a stage for a horse to enter up top; we manage it. You want balconies, banda—two different banda, seen offside the stage—and we manage that. We build the beginnings of your volcano!”

  Conrad opened his mouth to say that he had seen the wooden framework, with metal braces bolted to it, and it swayed unnervingly. He didn’t get the chance.

  “You want a volcano for the pretty lady maybe to throw herself in, and then the man-like-a-lady to throw himself in after. That’s what you say! That’s what you get. Now you want a pyramid, only’s not a pyramid, but a tower of steps. And you want this upstage without blocking the god-fucking-damn volcano!”

  He reached p
iercing levels of sound again, and Conrad couldn’t hold back a wince.

  Paolo-Isaura wandered in, presumably drawn by the noise. She raised her eyebrows at Conrad, but didn’t get a chance to interrupt the gang-boss.

  “—And you want a volcano she erupts! Smoke, fire, lava, boulders, collapse! You get collapse, I’m telling you.” Angelotti reached forward and poked Conrad’s waistcoat, leaving a plaster fingerprint. “You get more than collapse, when the stage it catches fire!”

  “Someone must have passed along the wrong instructions,” Conrad cut in, and stepped heavily and surreptitiously on Paolo’s shoe. He astonished himself with the easiness of a bare-faced lie. “The decision’s still in committee. As to whether we have the erupting volcano, or the step-pyramid struck by lightning in a thunderstorm… I’ll get back to you by five o’clock today.”

  Meaning we have to commit ourselves to the end of Act IV’s staging.

  Paolo cut in with bubbling enthusiasm. “That’s why the King was determined to get you and your stage crew for this, Signore Angelotti! He knew you’re the best to handle this work at the very short notice we have.”

  The fair-haired man snorted, but less confrontationally than Conrad thought he might.

  “My assistant here, Paolo, will take notes on your plans for each spectacle.” Conrad bowed, and moved away, not catching Gianpaolo’s eye as he went. If he wants to be in opera, she can take the good with the bad!

  Conrad made fists of his two hands and stretched out his arms, muscles cracking; shoulders back, scapulae almost touching. He gave a wuff!, felt himself more awake, and took the opportunity of Luigi wandering out after Isaura to sit down to uninterrupted work.

  It was quite some time before Conrad realised that Tullio hadn’t returned.

  Conrad found Isaura in the main rehearsal cave.

  “Probably found a mate to drink with,” she remarked. “I haven’t seen him since this morning.”

  The police chief, who had been showing a keen interest in Paolo-Isaura’s conducting of Act IV Scene II, picked up his bicorne hat.

  “I’ll go find him, shall I?” Luigi offered. “I ought to check the patrols are doing their work properly and not sitting around in taverns gambling.”

  “Take one of the dumb riflemen with you,” Conrad advised Luigi.

  The man’s departing mutter would have made him laugh on another day. It did not penetrate the fog of fear that Conrad felt settling on him.

  Roberto Capiraso shouldered in past Luigi, deaf to nuances of atmosphere. “What’s this about confirming the staging today?”

  Isaura fixed him with a confrontational eye. “You mean when it should have been confirmed two weeks ago? If we didn’t have a crew as good as Michele’s they’d have quit!”

  It took a quarter hour to calm the composer down.

  Conrad caught sight of Luigi striding back through the mine-caves.

  The police chief was pale, some emotion shrouding his features like snow covering a landscape. All Conrad could think was, Something has happened.

  His mind made lightning connections. The piano-stool scraped the stone as Conrad shoved past it, grabbing Luigi Esposito’s arm. “Where is he?”

  “The soldiers have rushed him to their surgeon.”

  Luigi reversed the grip and caught Conrad’s sleeve. Conrad, surprised, was brought to a halt.

  “Listen, first, Corrado! He went out with an escort. The rifleman was found dead, knifed, in the alley leading to the baker’s entrance. They didn’t get a chance to use their pistols; no shots were fired. I found Tullio, unconscious, propped up against the shop-front. He had this note pinned to his coat.”

  Conrad took the dirty piece of paper.

  The lights were too dim, or Conrad’s eyes too blurred.

  He held the paper up into the beam of an oil lamp.

  “This could be Giambattista Velluti—or any one of the cast of your opera. Stop while you still can.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Conrad folded the paper, creased it along the folds, and passed it back to Luigi Esposito. “Show it to the King. First, take me to Tullio.”

  Barely conscious of being up out of the tunnels and into a bright morning—as the time turned out to be—Conrad sat for what seemed hours beside Tullio’s bed in the infirmary of the Little Sisters. Waiting for a doctor, for anyone, to tell him if Tullio would live.

  Luigi Esposito returned later in the morning, pulling up another chair and sitting down, and studying the bruises and stitching on Tullio Rossi’s face.

  Deliberately encouraging, Luigi said, “He’s had worse some Saturday nights. He’ll be fine.”

  Conrad ignored that, although the doctor had concurred. “We got careless. Despite the escort, he was almost beaten to death because he was recognised as ‘one of the servants’ who go in and out of the catacombs. The Prince’s Men—”

  He took a breath, conscious of the oppressive silence of the infirmary, along with the stink of faeces and sickness.

  “—The Prince’s Men saw him as just another servant, a thing they could use to deliver a message to us.” Conrad steadied himself with difficulty. “I could almost forgive them if they attacked him because he’s Tullio Rossi and invaluable to putting on the counter-opera! If he dies—”

  Luigi grasped his elbow. Conrad forced his voice to quietness, holding down the rage and pain so as not to disturb the unconscious man.

  “—If he dies, I’ll finish this opera, and then I’ll start with Adalrico Silvestri, and after that, I’ll take any one of the Prince’s Men I can reach. And I’ll make them hurt.”

  Isaura came quietly into the infirmary before midday, and stood beside Conrad, gazing down at Tullio’s unconscious body.

  “We need you.” Her tone was unapologetic, but Conrad heard the slight crack in her voice. “Corradino…”

  It was, he realised with some surprise, still Tuesday. The seventh day of the month. Seven days left before the first night.

  He left his chair without making a sound, and stood beside his sister.

  “Tullio would slap me if I messed this up because of him.”

  “He would—” Paolo-Isaura broke off.

  An infantry sergeant of indeterminate age wandered up to the unconscious man sprawled in the hospital bed. Ignoring Conrad—clearly of too high a social station to be concerned with the patient—he leaned over, and muttered, “Rossi, you bad-tempered bastard, what are you up to now?”

  Conrad drew Isaura aside by her elbow.

  “It’s one of the island-Sicilian regiments of Foot.” Conrad recognised the insignia. He knew the Teatro San Carlo backstage area was almost ready, final stage furnishings having been added daily, and stood under heavy guard, now. Ferdinand had brought in two new regiments.

  “And?” Paolo glowered.

  Conrad made an effort to explain that Tullio Rossi was protected by the infantry’s informal “he may be a bad-tempered bastard but he’s our bad-tempered bastard.” Which is as good as most men’s sworn court oath.

  After that, it was not such a strain to leave for a few hours.

  And the time has come, Conrad realised, when people have to be warned.

  Below ground, the cast was at the stage of hair-pulling hysterics.

  Isaura elbowed into the scrimmage, and bellowed with surprising penetration at Giambattista Velluti. “How many times must I tell you? You sing plain on the syllables people need to hear to make sense of this! You make ornaments on the extraneous syllables, or you wait until the repeat verse which is what it’s fucking for!”

  Conrad tiptoed past the scrum, to where Roberto Capiraso stood at the entrance to his cell-like library, watching with anxiety.

  “This is normal.” Conrad couldn’t tell if he reassured himself or Roberto.

  Hardly listening, the dark man stroked his cropped beard. “We’re telling them today.”

  Velluti shied his shoe at Isaura. Conrad winced, even though the throw deliberately missed. It battered the forte
-piano still further.

  “We can’t put it off,” Conrad agreed. “But let’s at least let them eat first.”

  Tuesday’s midday brought a scent of dust and horse-dung and the early-flowering camellias, sifting down through the tunnels and aqueducts. The singers and musicians sat together on chairs or Angelotti’s makeshift wooden stage, regardless of rank (except for Velluti, who preferred to be surrounded by his acolytes), and ate bread and olives, and drank watered wine.

  Conrad’s stomach clenched up sufficiently that he couldn’t eat.

  Roberto’s voice, behind him, said quietly, “There’s no way of warning them about the eruptions to come, unless they know about the men behind this.”

  “I know…” Conrad made sure by eye that he had singers and chorus together in the echoing smooth-walled chamber. The second violin led in the few missing musicians, with a nod to Isaura-Paolo. Conrad had been careful to make sure every key role had a man who could step into it. Michele Angelotti and his crew and apprentices noisily joined them. Conrad waited while they ambled up in a group, and sat down on spare chairs and benches.

  “Wish we had these acoustics in the San Carlo,” Armando Annicchiarico muttered. More than one voice agreed with the second castrato.

  Conrad snorted. “I’ve considered staging the whole opera under Naples, don’t think I haven’t! If it wasn’t for needing an audience, I’d do it!”

  “Safer down here,” the diminutive tenor Lorenzo Bonfigli observed. He looked up at Conrad with eyes bright in the eternal lamp light. “Corrado, why do we need an audience, again?”

  There was general laughter at that. Conrad caught Roberto’s eye, where il Superbo leaned against the wall. The man shrugged.

  So you have no better idea of how to handle this than I do!

  “We may not in fact require an audience—” As the Prince’s Men apparently didn’t at Tambora. “—but I think we’re stronger for one. They give adulation; we give them everything we have; the stronger they are, the more they give us, and so on, back and forth. Certainly everyone’s seen it work the other way, when the Pit aren’t interested in anything but gambling, and you can’t hear the singing for the conversation from the Boxes.”