“Cappu, then.”
“And after that? What would you like for breakfast? And don’t say, ‘Whatever I’m having.’”
I finally smiled. “All right. Some fruit and cereal.”
“Muesli, granola, or Cap’n Crunch?”
“Cap’n Crunch? You’re kidding.”
“Actually, I am. I just wanted to see if you were paying attention. So, Muesli or granola?”
“Either one is fine.”
Tony waggled his finger at me. “A decision, please.”
“Muesli, then.”
While Tony got busy in the kitchen, I took a much-needed shower. Coffee was brought in partway through, and he stood for a moment watching me through the transparent curtain as I rinsed off my hair. I suddenly felt self-conscious, but then remembered his soft words of endearment the night before. It also crossed my mind that he might have stood just like this watching a whole parade of previous women that he’d seduced. Violetta Valéry again sprang to mind, but again the gender of those involved was reversed.
Life was currently far too complicated for my confused brain.
Chapter Seventeen
It had been a wild and woolly few days.
First, there had been the fact that I’d never gotten around to booking the flight to London for my gig to sing Carmina Burana with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Once again, I’d been brought up short, and it also showed me how completely distracted I’d been by the mess consuming my personal life. It had only been a question from Tony about driving me to the airport that made me realize I’d made another potentially disastrous slip-up. The outrageous cost of the last-minute ticket drove the hard lesson home. For once, my travel agent couldn’t work any miracles.
“Let me show you how easy it is to do this sort of thing on your computer,” he said, as we sat on the sofa after another fabulous dinner.
I made a face. “Except I don’t have one anymore, remember?”
“You can use this until you settle with the insurance company, and I’ll bring one from the store for my own needs.” He turned on his laptop and I snuggled in so I could see the screen. “Now we key in your flight information. Now here’s where you set the computer to send you an email, reminding you about it.”
I watched and learned. “What was that you just put in?”
“A reminder to call me.”
“How come the calendar’s now got one of those for every day?”
Tony looked at me patiently. “Just a hint.” After kissing my forehead gently, he added, “You don’t want me to be worried about you the whole time you’re in Paris, do you? As long as I hear from you regularly, I won’t be as concerned.”
Taking a deep breath, I asked him, “Tony, why weren’t you snatched up long ago?”
He pursed his lips. “All right,” he sighed. “Fair question. I was engaged once.”
“What happened?”
“I was twenty-seven and working for my dad’s food importing business. That involved a lot of travel to Italy. I met a girl in Turin and we fell madly in love. After a year of seeing each other, I asked her to marry me. Her family wasn’t sure, and it took me a long time and a lot of hard work to win them over. Finally, her father gave his blessing. I was one happy guy.
“Then my trips to Italy were less frequent after my dad became ill, and I was forced to take over more of the day-to-day operations. When I finally made it over for a holiday right after Christmas, I knew immediately that something wasn’t right. Our wedding was only six months away and Raffaella didn’t even want to talk about it.”
I squeezed his hand. “She’d met someone else.”
Tony looked at me sadly. “It was worse than that. It was someone I’d introduced her to. They’d been secretly meeting for nearly a year.” He took a deep breath. “It gets even worse. Raffaella was pregnant by him. The whole thing was just too awful for words.”
“I cannot imagine what that must have felt like.”
“Soon after, my dad died. I completely lost heart in everything and sold the business. With the proceeds, I bought this condo, the car I’d always dreamed of, and invested the rest. I thought it might make me feel better, but it didn’t.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Nearly six years.”
“And in between then and now?”
He just shrugged. “I got bored with nothing to do, took a job selling high-end restaurant equipment. Got bored with that and took the job at the computer store.”
“And, ah, relationships?”
“There didn’t seem any reason.” Then a smile lit his face. “Until now.”
In talking my plans over with Tony, we realized that the performance in London provided the perfect way to get into France unnoticed. With European Union integration, immigration checks once you were inside the EU had pretty well become a thing of the past. All I had to do was pay cash for a ticket on the Eurostar and I would be in France without anyone being the wiser. Of course, this meant I’d have to give the slip to whoever might be following me. We had great fun figuring out outlandish ways for me to get from my hotel to St. Pancras station, where I’d catch the train.
I spent the days in long sessions with Lili working on several things but focusing on Carmina Burana. I’d performed the solo soprano part in this groundbreaking cantata by Orff five times over the years, but it had been four years since the last one, and I did not feel really ready until my final coaching, literally on my way out the door to the airport.
Tony had been a brick throughout, first going with me to the police, where we promoted the idea that it was just a common robbery that had taken place in my condo, at which point I’d gone back to it with two burly detectives in tow. Once they’d found out who I was, the police had been great and promised to do their best to keep my problems out of the news.
The mess in my condo was worse than I imagined, and there was a very nervous moment when one of the detectives observed that it looked as if someone had been looking for something. The detectives said it was obvious the person searching my apartment had been going as fast as he could. They also later reported that the guy who lived on the floor below told them he’d heard several bumps starting around 11:45 on the morning of the break-in but had assumed I was moving furniture or something. I’d left the building barely five minutes earlier. Even more disturbing, they obviously knew I was going to be out for awhile, which meant they’d probably put a bug on my phone or something. I couldn’t ask the cops to look for that.
Not wanting to stay a moment longer than I needed to, I stuffed clothes and other things into two large suitcases and then indulged in a bit of subterfuge at the Royal York Hotel. Tony had suggested the old “in one door and out the other” routine, in this case using the underground corridor to get from the hotel to the subway station. Anyone following me would think that I’d gone to the hotel to check in. Nobody followed me down the corridor in the five minutes I kept watch.
To keep pursuers further off track, Lili and I worked at a colleague’s house in North Toronto. It all felt like living in a spy novel, but I was really that spooked.
At my final session with her, I introduced Tony. To my surprise, she asked him to sing some vocal exercises and “Prendi, l’anel ti dono” from Bellini’s La Sonnambula. He seemed caught off guard, but she pronounced his voice good, which pleased me very much.
“I can work with what God has given you,” she told him. “There are several deficits in your vocal production that can be easily fixed. Have you considered concentrating on the bel canto repertoire? Your voice is well-suited to it.”
I knew Tony would be mildly disappointed, because he loved Romantic Italian opera so much, but he seemed surprisingly buoyed by Lili’s comments, and he quickly made an appointment for their first session. I got her aside on the way out the door to ask if she was only doing this for me.
Her remark was characteristically blunt. “Partly, but the boy does have a nice voice, though small and with no real
carrying power. Let me see what I can do for him. He might well surprise us.”
At the airport, I silently watched Tony haul my two suitcases out of his car’s trunk. All day I’d been dreading having to say au revoir. After London I had only six days to find my husband. After that I would need to be in Dallas for a benefit concert, then off to the San Francisco Opera for another last-minute appearance as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, something Alex had managed to dig up the week before. It would be nearly a month before we’d see each other again.
“You will call me if you need to?” Tony asked. “Don’t be stiff-necked about asking for help.”
“I will call.”
“And promise you won’t do anything foolish.”
“I never do.” Boy was that a whopper!
Tony smiled. “This has been a wonderful week for me.”
I hugged him close. “And, despite it all, for me, too. You’ve been terrific.”
He kissed me, but it was rather chaste, considering what we’d gotten up to the past few days. I wanted more, but his instincts were right: getting close in public could be problematic. One never knew who would spot you and where the resulting photos from their cellphones would wind up, something Gerhard had drummed into my head years ago when spotting paparazzi was fairly easy. Tony seemed to understand that innately, and I was extremely grateful.
“Have a great flight, Marta. Call me when you get to London.”
“Yes, Tony,” I answered, chuckling as I grabbed the handles of the two bags and wheeled them into the terminal.
As I joined the other passengers at the check-in line, I heaved a big sigh. I’d been dreading that Tony might say he loved me.
Why was I so afraid of hearing that?
The first rehearsal for Carmina Burana went very well indeed. I’d been in good voice and singing the part came really easily. The other soloists were top-notch, too, and the multiple choruses this massive work uses had been wonderfully prepared. We had two performances scheduled, one of which was to be recorded for later broadcast on TV. The producers wanted an interview with me about the resurgence of my career, and that was a very pleasant surprise.
Just before I’d left Toronto, the music arrived for the percussion concert I’d been silly enough to agree to do. There were some pieces I vaguely remembered, but it had been so long since I picked up sticks that everything looked far more complicated than I remembered. Since a good part of road trips are always spent sitting around hotel rooms, at the last minute I went back to the apartment (with Tony in tow), grabbed my stick bag and a couple of practice pads — small discs that feel like a drumhead when you hit them, but don’t make a lot of noise — and stuffed them in one of my already-too-full suitcases. My wrists and hands were way out of shape after so long and would need a lot of work.
Since Burana uses massive amounts of percussion, I made friends with the percussionists, but I was too shy to tell them why. They probably would have playfully told me to prove I really knew how to play. That could have proved rather embarrassing.
But after two night’s practice in my hotel room, I realized that a lot of what I’d learned way back when was returning more easily than I’d expected. Yeah, my wrists turned to jelly after a half-hour of rudiments, but the feel of the sticks was still there.
The next morning, I got to rehearsal early. When I saw that all of the percussion instruments were already set up and nobody present, I couldn’t resist. Plunking myself down on the stool behind one of the two sets of timpani, I opened the music that was waiting on the stand, whipped them into tune by ear (something I’ve always been good at), and began playing.
Happily at it, I didn’t notice how much time had passed, and when I resurfaced, I was horrified to find the entire percussion section and a good part of the orchestra silently watching me. The timpanist whose part I was playing had heard me from the Green Room and come out to investigate. Finding me, he’d gone for the rest of his cronies and several others had tagged along, sneaking out to watch.
They all burst into applause, and I was absolutely mortified, feeling like someone with her fingers caught in the cookie jar. The timpanist came forward with a felt-tipped marker.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“I’d like you to sign my sticks. People won’t believe me when I tell them the story otherwise.”
Another one gave me the backhanded compliment of the century. “Now we know why you’re about the only singer who seems to have any sense of rhythm!”
After that, I became the mascot of the percussion section. They even snuck me back to play snare for one section, and when the conductor, Sir Michael Dickson, discovered me back there, he burst out laughing and told the orchestra’s manager that I should be getting doubler’s rates.
While everything had gone amazingly well so far in London, as my trip to France approached, I was getting more and more nervous, and asked myself nearly every hour just what the hell I was getting myself into.
Tony tried hard through numerous emails and phone calls to keep me in a good frame of mind. Never once did he succumb to asking if I wanted him to fly over, which was very astute and thoughtful of him. The last thing I wanted, if I did manage to corner my husband, was to have the new boyfriend hovering in the background.
The morning after the second concert, I packed my suitcases, called the hotel’s concierge, and asked if he would arrange to have them forwarded to the hotel I’d been booked into for the Dallas gig. If I was going to avoid being followed, I didn’t want to be burdened with two huge suitcases. What I would need for Paris went into two shoulder bags I’d brought. These I had sent ahead to St. Pancras.
An hour before train time, I left the hotel in a cab bound for Harrods (certainly a place a hotshot opera star could be expected to go). I walked in the front entrance, made a bee-line for the side entrance where there was a cab stand, and ducked into the first one.
“Where to, miss?” the driver said in a Jamaican accent.
“St. Pancras, but wait a moment, okay?”
“Sure thing,” he said as he turned on the meter.
We waited about three minutes, but I didn’t believe anyone came out looking for missing opera singers. Even as we moved into the traffic, though, I made note of cars that pulled out. Some stayed with us a surprisingly long time, and the cab driver probably thought I was nuts the way I kept looking out the back window. Usually, they’re very chatty, but this guy eyed me warily through the rear-view mirror. Once we got to St. Pancras, I pressed some bills into his hand and ducked into the station without waiting for change.
Perhaps, the whole exercise was a bit juvenile, but I just didn’t want to take chances. If anyone inquired after me, the desk staff at the hotel had been instructed to say I’d left for Dallas.
As I boarded the train, I felt I’d covered all the bases as best I could.
Our arrival at Le Gare du Nord in Paris was precisely on time, something trains don’t manage to do all that often in North America. We’d barely stopped when I snatched up my two bags and ran for a taxi.
Drivers in Paris are completely mad, and the cab drivers are the worst. In Montreal, they say green means go, red means look before you drive through the intersection, and yellow means go faster. Paris traffic is just crazy all the time, permanently stuck on yellow.
When I get into a Paris cab, I usually just shut my eyes and rely on good luck to get me to my destination in one piece. Today, though, I needed to keep my eyes open, so I saw all the near misses and close calls. The important thing was that I didn’t see anyone who remotely looked like they could be following us.
The cabbie was Algerian and peppered me with questions in highly unintelligible French when he found out I was from Canada. I did my best to carry on the conversation while keeping my eyes peeled, both front and back: back to see who might be following, and front because Amad had the disconcerting habit of turning around whenever he said something to me. I saved us from certain death at least a half dozen
times before he got me to the B&B I’d booked in the 13th arrondissement.
The place had been recommended by two brothers who played in the Royal Phil: Glenn was one of the percussionists and his brother Barry played bassoon. We’d gone out for “a pie and a pint” during a break during that last day of rehearsal. Both liked to duck over to Paris for the occasional weekend and spent their summer “hols” in Normandy.
“If you want to come and go as you like, this is the place,” Glenn had told me about the B&B. Barry had nodded enthusiastically.
They’d informed me that the proprietor also had a studio apartment a few blocks away that I could get for a very nice price and still have breakfast at the main location. Not wanting anyone to know what I was up to, I jumped at their suggestion.
Michel, the proprietor, his cute little grandson in tow, helped me get settled in the apartment, which was three blocks away from the main house. On the second floor of what seemed to be a very old building, the single room had recently been renovated to the point where it even had wireless Internet. As soon as I was alone, I tapped out a quick email to Tony, telling him that I’d arrived safe and sound — and un-followed as far as I knew. He responded almost instantaneously with a short message: “Thank the Lord. Please keep me informed. — Tony.” I smiled at the thought of him sitting at his computer waiting to hear from me.
Even though I felt as if a nap might go down well, I forced myself to gather up my sheets of computer printouts and maps and head out into the city for a little investigative work.
The day (unnoticed on that nerve-wracking cab ride) was quite magnificent and warm for early November. I’d packed a knitted cap and my favourite scarf (always a prerequisite for a singer’s vulnerable throat) but decided I didn’t need either.
The nearest shop selling Harley Davidson motorcycles and parts lay west of where I was staying. It was not the most likely location to get a lead on my husband, but I wanted to try out my story to see how it would fly before I hit the place I felt would be my best bet. A little rehearsal never hurts if you want to give your best performance.
Masques and Murder — Death at the Opera 2-Book Bundle Page 20