Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  “Che còsa!” yelled Ponte from the darkness behind them, and at the same moment January heard the outer door slam.

  He dodged through the arch again, across the second room, where Ponte was swinging around like a fly-stung bullock, threw himself toward the thin strip of brightness that marked the outer threshold. . . .

  And as the door jarred ungivingly, with the clatter of a bolt outside, he heard d’Isola scream.

  TWELVE

  “Drusilla!” Candle-light jigged crazily over walls and ceiling-beams as Cavallo blundered through the inner archway. “Drusilla!”

  January heaved on the door, and heard the heavy clatter of a lock outside. “Ibn al-harâm,” he said, one of Ayasha’s favorite oaths.

  Both tenors seized the door-handle, threw their weight against the planks, thrust and rattled and slammed while the single flame—still in Cavallo’s hand—jerked reeling shadows against the greater dark beneath the house. Both continued to yell the soprano’s name as they pounded until January shouted “Be quiet! Let me listen.”

  He pressed his ear to the door in the ensuing hush.

  Nothing. No further screams or cries, no sound of struggle. Somewhere a crow squawked on the bayou.

  Then a quick hush-hush-hush of voluminous skirts and slender ankles in long grass, and d’Isola’s voice, close on the other side of the planks. “Silvio?”

  That started Cavallo and Ponte again. “Drusilla! Drusilla, what happened? Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right.” She sounded breathless with running, and on the verge of tears. “There were men, three men . . .” More rattling at the door, and the heavy thump of a padlock before she said, “I tripped and broke the heel of my shoe, and my dress is all muddy. I think it may be completely spoilt. There’s a lock here, two locks . . .”

  January had already ascertained that as the door opened outward, the hinges were on the outside as well. He muttered, “Ibn al-harâm, ” again, and felt in his pockets for another candle-stub. “Mamzelle, listen,” he said over his two companions’ energetic cursing at Belaggio. “What happened to the men you saw? Which way did they go?”

  Long and panicky silence. Then, “I—I don’t know, Signor. I screamed, and ran. . . .”

  Then they might still be around.

  But if that was the case, there was nothing to be done anyway, so he went on. “Mamzelle, one of those little buildings behind the house is going to be a carpenter’s shop. Look around and see if you can find an ax or a chisel or a crowbar, even a screw-driver. . . .” He used the French word for it, tournevis, not knowing the Italian, and added—because almost certainly La d’Isola had never seen or heard of such a thing in her life, “It’s like a slender chisel, a thin rod with one end flattened and a handle on the other. If you can, bring it. If not, take one of the horses and ride along the bayou until you come to a house. Tell them what happened and ask for help.”

  “I . . . I don’t know how to ride a horse.” Her voice snagged on a sob. “I can drive.”

  “Cara,” said Cavallo, crowding close to January to speak. “When you get back to the gig, just put the bit back into the horse’s mouth and slip the bridle back up around his head, all right?”

  “That metal thing you took out when you tied him up? Will he bite me?”

  I’LL bite you if you don’t quit wasting time, thought January, exasperated, though it was quite clear La d’Isola was terrified in a situation far beyond her abilities.

  “See if you can find a tool to get us out, Signorina,” he said instead.

  “All right.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “I will be quick.”

  “Che culo, you send her off alone?” Ponte’s protest drowned the scampering swish-swish of skirts and weeds. “Those bandits may still be about. . . .”

  “If they were about, they’ve had plenty of time to seize her while we were talking,” January pointed out. “And they didn’t.” He sat on the brick floor, pulled up his trouser-leg, and unsheathed from his boot the skinning-knife that would have gotten him locked in the Cabildo overnight, had the City Guards seen him with such a weapon in his hand. “While we wait, let’s see if whoever set this trap thought to search under the house for anything that might be used as a tool.”

  It quickly became apparent that if there had ever been anything in the various small store-rooms sharp enough to cut wood or strong enough to be used as a lever, it was gone now.

  “A trap!” Cavallo smote his palm with his fist. “What fools we were! They have taken everything. . . .”

  “Or the neighbors have.” Ponte held up his candle high and poked behind the broken oil-jars piled in a corner. “In the campagna it is the same, Silvio. Whether it is the lion that dies or the jackal, the ants will pick the carcass. When you are very poor, the tiles off a dead man’s roof are treasure. What makes you say it is a trap, Signor?”

  “The fresh scratches,” said January. “That box of rubble was dragged far enough from the outer door to make sure we were all in here. They must not have seen Mademoiselle d’Isola when they shut it. But it would be the easiest thing in the world to make certain she intercepted some kind of note that would bring her here.”

  “Austrian pigs,” Cavallo gritted through his teeth, “to drag a young girl into this.” He strode impetuously through the wine-room and into the chamber of the baskets and the oil-jars, and kicked the side of the box of debris.

  “Austrians?” January followed, and knelt to examine the fragments of baskets. They’d been under a roof-leak and were soaked through. “Have you string in your pocket, Signor?”

  “String?” Cavallo shook his head with a puzzled frown, and January cursed again. “If this were the work of Incantobelli,” Cavallo went on, “or of Signor Davis— someone who simply wishes to disrupt the opera—he would have struck tomorrow. Today only the dress rehearsal is at stake. Attend, Signor.” He and Ponte followed January back to the outer door.

  “I think Signor Belaggio is being used by the Vienna government to carry messages to its agents in other countries. To do little jobs for them here and there. Nothing of any importance, you understand—”

  “Even the Emperor isn’t that stupid,” put in Ponte.

  “—but things that put him in touch with the Emperor’s agents in Havana, and here.”

  “Here?” January took his powder-flask from his pocket and shook it. Idiot, he told himself. You should have refilled it, either at Olympe’s or in Rose’s workshop at the Théâtre.

  Cavallo shrugged. “All of America to the west and south is torn apart now by the struggle for freedom from Spain. All the gold and silver of Mexico, all the coffee and gold and emeralds and sugar of New Grenada and Cuba and the lands to the south . . . You don’t think Austria has her agents in those places, sniffing like sharks in the water for blood? The Bourbons of Spain and the Hapsburgs, they are brothers and bedfellows. You think Austria’s going to have their paymaster there, where one army or another can overrun him before he can flee— What are you doing, Signor?”

  He leaned curiously over January’s shoulder as January wedged the powder-flask, as well as he could—it was a bulbous copper one and slipped from the bits of wood he was using—against the base of the door. “I’m hoping there’s enough powder to at least weaken the timbers.” January poured out a thin line of powder. “It’s why I asked for string—to fix this up closer to the hinges, and so I wouldn’t expend powder on making a fuse.”

  “Could you not pour the powder onto where the hinges would be?” Ponte nodded diffidently toward the solid slabs of oak. “With it on the floor like that, it cannot weaken the door much.”

  “Powder itself doesn’t explode,” said January. “It burns. It’s the gases expanding that cause the explosion. The flask is small enough to concentrate the gases from the burning powder into a bomb, but it will most likely simply shoot backward into the room rather than blow up the door. That’s what you were doing at the Fatted Calf Thursday night, then? Watching to see whom Be
laggio met?”

  Cavallo nodded. “It is imperative that we know who these men are.”

  “So you can tell your friends in Young Italy to beware of them?”

  The tenor’s dark eyes flicked sidelong at the dry note in January’s voice.

  January took the candle from his hand, stepped to the door again, and yelled through it, “Mamzelle! Stand clear! Stand well clear!” Then he set light to the powder trail, and he and the two young friends retreated into the farthest of the lightless rooms.

  There was a shattering report, the crack of the flask striking the opposite wall, and a huge stink of powder. Coughing in the smoke, January led the way back to the first of the storage-rooms.

  The thick planks of the door looked as if they’d been struck by a club, but as he’d feared it would, the force of the explosion had shot the flask back into the room like a bullet rather than expending much force on the door. January threw himself against the door: there was still no give in those solid planks.

  “Damn it,” he sighed. “We’re going to have to do this the hard way.”

  “You do not approve of Young Italy?” asked Cavallo as January stripped off his jacket and went to break up the drier pieces of the wine-racks in the second room.

  “Riots make me nervous,” January said. “People who think the justice of their cause excuses the death of people who might or might not be guilty of any legal crime make me nervous.”

  “And what of the freedom of man?” returned Cavallo quietly. “My brother died in an Austrian prison, Signor; died of jail fever, after five years in a cell, without trial, merely because the Austrian Viceroy of Milan thought that he might be a Carbonaro. What became of his sweet-heart—a girl of the shops, a girl of the people, but honest— I still do not know. The Austrians were given Milan—and Venice, Piedmont, Sardinia—because they sided against Napoleon. To them we are a conquered people, to be taxed, and ruled, and spied upon by their secret police, as the Spanish ruled us before we were liberated.”

  “And your liberator Napoleon sold my country—the land of my birth, where I had certain liberties as a man— to the Americans, because he needed the cash,” replied January. “I lived in Paris under the Bourbons, Signor. Can you tell me that even after the French took over, a man couldn’t be imprisoned without trial in Milan if he offended the wrong person? Couldn’t be beaten up in the streets without recourse? Can you tell me that poor men are able to bring suit against rich ones in Naples, which is an independent state, and still is what it was before Napoleon came?”

  Cavallo bit his lip, and January gathered his armload of broken-up wood from the wine-racks and carried it back to the outermost room. Cavallo and Ponte followed him a moment later, each coatless and bearing as many billets as he could. January had already heaped his burden on the floor near the black burned smear the exploding powder-flask had left, and was probing carefully down the barrel of his pistol to extract the ball and what little powder remained.

  “You are right, of course,” said Cavallo as he added his wood to the pile. “And no, I do not imagine that Italy will be—an earthly paradise—if the Austrians go. Men are only men.”

  He turned up his sleeves, and stacked the wood in such a fashion that any spark kindled would have expired immediately from suffocation. Ponte knelt beside him and rearranged the sticks so they would actually burn. “But suppose a man came to you and said, ‘Be my slave, and I promise you you will never go hungry. You will never be without a warm place to sleep—I will let you marry whom you please and raise your children as you please, so long as they will be my slaves—well-fed and happy slaves—as well.’ What would you say?”

  January grinned slowly. “Viva la Patria, I suppose.” He pulled off his shirt. “Do you have a flask in your pocket, Signor?” he asked, going to sop his red-and-blue calico in the nearest floor puddle. “Dribble the brandy there, where the hinge will be on the outside of the door. It’s like Mount Vesuvius—we keep the fire where we need it, and make sure the rest of the place doesn’t catch and cook us before the wood weakens.”

  Seeing what he was doing, the other two stripped their shirts and did the same, wetting down the wood around the place where they wanted the fire to concentrate. With luck, thought January, who’d seen the same technique used in large when the sugar fields were burned after harvest, there wouldn’t be so much smoke that they’d all suffocate.

  “Keep the shirts ready.” He went back to the puddle, sopped the worn calico in it again. “I have no idea how long this’ll take.” He touched the wick of the one remaining candle to the alcohol-soaked cypress of the door, then to the piled wood beneath. Flame seared up with a strong smell of burning brandy and powder. “And did Belaggio meet with agents of Austria Thursday night?”

  “He certainly met with someone,” said Cavallo. “We saw Marsan come, at about midnight. . . .”

  “Well, we know what he was doing there.”

  Cavallo opened his mouth to snap a rebuke; then he sighed. “Again you are right,” he said. “But please do not judge her harshly. Drusilla is the daughter of poor people, almost a child of the streets. She has talent, but she obtained her training—well, in whatever fashion she could, not having the choices that a girl of better means would have. If she saw in Belaggio a way to come here to the New World—to seek a better life—which of us would not have done the same had we been young, and female, and in such circumstances? Life is not easy for a girl who has no family.”

  “No.” January thought again of Dominique, and of Kate the Gouger standing in the mud and weeds behind the Eagle of Victory saloon, counting up the men she would have to bed. “No. I do not judge her for that.”

  Smoke was pouring from the wood of the door as the fire licked at the planks. January squeezed his wet shirt like a sponge around the area of the fire, coughing and turning his face aside from the smoke. The other two followed suit, keeping the fire contained, then retreated again to the next room, where they knelt in the doorway in the darkness, watching the progress of the blaze. It was quite clear by this time that La d’Isola had not located— or had failed to recognize—anything resembling a tool, and had gone to seek help.

  “There were three others who came after Marsan,” said Ponte. “Two big men, bearded, and then a third, who arrived in a cab.”

  “White men?”

  “The bearded men, yes,” replied the Sicilian. “Americans, I think. They dressed like Americans. The third one I did not see because I was across the street and the cab blocked my view.”

  “And he must have been white,” said January, “because men of color are forbidden to ride in cabs. And this man came out . . . ?”

  “I didn’t see him come out, Signor. The outcry started. I ran to fetch Silvio. . . .”

  “Whoever it was,” said January, “he might have slipped past us in the melee. But I think it likelier he went down the alley and got out through the gate of the Promenade Hotel. I heard it open and slam.”

  “But there was someone,” said Ponte. “To that I can swear.”

  “And you changed your clothes once you got there . . . ?”

  “We saw all the world in the alley,” said Cavallo. “That we did not expect. Our hotel is only across the street, but we had told La Montero that we were going back to our rooms, and she at least would guess we hadn’t returned there if she saw us still dressed as we were at rehearsal. Madame Scie also, and perhaps Belaggio as well.”

  “You think this unlikely,” added Ponte, tilting his head a little to regard January in the leaping yellow light. “But under the Austrians, men have been hanged on lesser suspicion.”

  The wood of the door was old, but it was close-grained cypress, and burned slowly. Twice more the three men soaked their shirts and wet down the wood around the blaze. There was nothing to use as kindling to re-start a second blaze were this one quenched. If the men d’Isola had seen were still around, the smoke would draw them.

  So at least they won’t be lying in wait for
us when we emerge.

  Odd.

  Did they just lock us in here like children locking play-mates in an armoire?

  He retreated again, coughing. He’d already guessed they’d miss the dress rehearsal. It was surely well after four. One thin needle of searing light sliced between the massive planks of the floorboards in the third room, its angle marking the lateness of the hour. When another forty minutes or so had passed, he signed to the others, and they raked away the remains of the kindling-fire and beat out the flames. It took the three of them several exhausting minutes, but they finally battered their way through the weakened timbers, twisted the lower hinge free, and crawled forth.

  As January had suspected, the hasp and padlock on the door were new. The screws that held it, new, too.

  They’d been expected.

  This was no spur-of-the-moment lockup, but a deliberate trap, set up well in advance.

  For d’Isola? For Cavallo?

  For me?

  For Belaggio, maybe?

  “She should have reached a house long ago, surely?” Cavallo gazed like a young eagle around the wasted fields, the dark line of cypress and the bayou beyond. “We passed several on our way here. She had but to follow the water. She could not have gotten lost.”

  January kept to himself his reflection on what might have happened to a dusky-skinned young woman, alone in this wilderness of swamp and woodland, and almost certainly on foot. The empty yard, scattered with charred beams, with broken bits of boxes and oil-jars in the sick-lied light, seemed filled with sinister silence save for the leathery creak of a tree-branch, like a hinge in the wind.

  He said only, “Let’s see if we can find her tracks.”

  All the horses were gone, including the stocking-footed bay gelding January had ridden. The scuff-marks in the dust and weeds of the yard were too unclear, in the failing light, to make out whether d’Isola had taken one of them. Certainly someone had unharnessed the gig. Though there were marks of some kind in the direction of the bayou, it was impossible, in the carpet of elephant-ear and last year’s brown oak-leaves, to make out the shape of the foot or whether it was a man’s or a woman’s, or which way they led.