When a composer writes about the most brilliant musician in the world, sooner or later in the course of the work he is going to have to come up with music that the audience really believes would gentle the Devils in Hell.
And Gluck did.
The gates of Hell opened. Head bowed, lyre under his arm, Orfeo passed through into shadow. The demons knelt, arms crossed on their breasts in humbled silence as the curtains closed.
An arm like an iron bracket hooked around January’s throat from behind, twisting and squeezing with a force strong enough to break his neck.
TWENTY-FOUR
There wasn’t so much as a half-second that January didn’t realize it was Big Lou. He dropped his weight, rolled his shoulder forward, trying to throw the man over, the swollen gray buzzing of blocked carotids already swimming in his head—it was like trying to shift a mountain. He got his foot in front of him and heaved backward with all his strength, and this did topple Big Lou between two columns of rock, jarred loose the strangling grip. January rammed and hammered with his elbows back behind him, beneath him, as he felt Big Lou rise up under him like a whale surfacing. He rolled, tried to get up, to kick, and Lou grabbed him, downed him. He heard the dark rags of his costume rip, his own grunt as the breath was driven from his lungs.
“Shaw!” bellowed January, rolling away from a punch that drove splinters from the stage-boards where his head had been. “Shaw!” And heard only a scream from backstage, and the drumming of panic-driven feet.
And smelled smoke.
Far more smoke than there had been a moment earlier.
It was dark among the flats and plaster rocks, only the red-glassed glare of the gas-jets giving a sort of infernal light. He grabbed Big Lou by the collar, dragged the bald bullet-head down with all his strength as his fist slammed upward. It was like hitting a cannon ball. Two, three times he struck, and rolled his head aside as Lou pounded him again. The man’s massive weight pinned him, the smoke-sting in his nostrils he’d thought—prayed—was just the leftover from the Demon Chorus grew worse. As he rolled, finally, to his feet, from the tail of his eye he caught the searing flare of red light from backstage.
And heard someone scream, “FIRE!”
Minou’s here! Upstairs, halls crowded, no way to get down . . .
Lou grabbed him, slammed him against the wall. This time January curled his shoulders, head tucked, spun the man’s weight into the wall instead. He kneed him hard, slammed his elbow into Lou’s throat, his own blood streaming into his eyes where the papier-mâché mask-edge had driven into his brow and cheeks. The shrieking was louder: “Fire! Get the pump . . . DAMN it . . . !”
Out front, too, now, screaming, the crash of benches, trampling.
Damn it, damn it, fire . . . He hammered that cannon-ball head trapped between his own fists and the bricks, frantic to finish this, get out while he could, get out before he burned. God damn it, damn it, damn . . . !
Big Lou staggered and January—mask shattered, costume in rags around his gasping body—stepped back to grab the only loose item in the wings heavy enough and hard enough to make any difference, a sandbag counterweight dangling from one of La Flaherty’s dance-wires. His fists were bleeding and Big Lou lunged for him like a wounded bull. He swung the sandbag and connected with the huge man’s skull so hard, he felt it through his arm to the shoulder.
Lou stopped, drew himself up, swaying. Red light haloed him, smoke and shrieking. . . .
Fall, God damn you, FALL!
January smote Lou again with every ounce of strength in his body; this time the man’s eyeballs rolled up and he went down. Someone knocked a flat over, running toward the door. The wild glare of orange-and-yellow flame spilled among the shadows. January pulled off his belt and the belt from Lou’s pants to bind the big man’s hands. He heard a man shout something that wasn’t Fire, incoherent words, and a girl screamed “Don’t! No!” but he barely paid attention. Seizing Lou’s bound hands, he began to drag the unconscious man back toward the stair, toward the door down into the prop-vault and so outside.
Blinding smoke filled backstage. Through it, January could glimpse the lick and lash of flame. Hot air seared his throat, and he dropped to his knees, crawling, dragging, but at least he could breathe as he crawled. The darkness among the flats confused him. He tried to avoid a blazing wall of trees and found himself lost in a pocket of smoke, walls around him, doors. He’d taken a wrong turn and couldn’t tell where he was in the huge cavern of backstage.
Only knew that the theater was burning, that he had to get out or burn, too. . . .
“This way!” A girl’s small hand grabbed his wrist. She must have seen the white designs on his chest, gleaming in the churning night of smoke. Coughing, dragging Lou’s unconscious weight, he crept after her blindly, writhing along the floor. In the sulfurous glare he saw Vincent Marsan’s daughter’s narrow, pointed face. Once her skirt caught fire and January dropped Big Lou’s hands, tore the burning cloth away from the bodice of her mourning dress. In her petticoats she grabbed Big Lou’s arms and the two of them began to drag again. . . .
Stairs, smoke pouring down them into the draft from the door. Lou’s heels bumping as January hauled him down. The alley’s darkness and the alley’s mud, and red light swirling behind the theater windows like the mad gleam in a lunatic’s eyes. People churned and heaved in the narrow space, shoving, calling each other’s names. Some were fighting to get out of the alley and others fighting to get in with water from the Promenade Hotel. The screams of horses, panicked and terrified by the smoke, from the other side of the wall as the stable-grooms led them away from the danger of the fire. The splash of water, the sudden choking sweet stink of wet hay.
Minou, thought January, I have to find Minou. . . .
He shoved Big Lou into the doorway in which the Gower boys had hidden to wait for their prey, and started to lead Jocelyn Marsan down the alley to safety. She balked, pulling back: “Mr. Knight’s still in there!” she cried. “The men with guns . . . !”
“What men?” January pulled the girl back against the corner of the cotton-press wall, out of the shoving, shouting crowd that jammed Camp Street from curb to curb. Carriages filled with maskers in Roman armor, Turkish pantaloons, dark evening-dress, and the rough clothes of stevedores and boatmen crammed and mixed and shuffled with them, adding to the sense of nightmare and preventing the pump-wagons from Municipal Engine Company Number Fourteen from getting through. The red flare pouring from the broken front windows showed him her terrified dark eyes.
“Orpheus—the man who played Orpheus, in the gold wig. And one of the Devils . . .”
“Maestro!” Shaw grabbed his arm. “You seen Belaggio?”
“He’s in the theater!” gasped Jocelyn Marsan, pointing back at the burning building. “Signor Belaggio and Mr. Knight both! Mr. Knight went backstage, and I followed him through the door at the end of the corridor. . . .”
“Why?”
She looked a little startled that Shaw would demand an explanation, but said, “He was selling slaves. He and my father. He was going to send me to the convent, and I thought if I told him I knew about the slaves, he’d let me go to school in France instead. But when the fire started, the man who’d played Orpheus, and one of the Devils, came out with guns, and made them go up the stairs—”
“Damn it!” Shaw looked back toward the wild Hell of smoke and red-lit windows. “Why the tarnation . . . They’ll never get out!”
“They will.” Rose Vitrac stepped forward. January saw she was in evening dress—her old yellow tarlatan singed and smoke-blotched—and felt both horror and gratitude that he hadn’t known she was in the theater. “The rest of the building’s starting to catch now, but only just. That first blaze, the one that drove everyone out . . . I think that was set up.”
“Set up?” said January, baffled—flames were beginning to show over the edge of the roof.
Shaw only narrowed his eyes and asked, “You mean they fired the place
on purpose?”
“I mean the flame appeared all at the same time in the empty boxes—but only in the empty boxes—and in every empty box, all the way along. It didn’t spread from one to the other, and it didn’t catch in the ones in between. And only in the back of the boxes, just the flare of firelight. The fire on the stage was all behind the flats, behind pieces of scenery. . . .”
“Like that there volcano,” said Shaw. He looked back at the flame pouring from the windows. “Sure is goin’ good now. . . .”
“But they started it as a controlled burn.” January remembered the soaked timbers of the door of Cornouiller, the varnished troughs on Mt. Vesuvius’s sides. “To clear the theater.” It was probably, he thought, the only reason he and Jocelyn had gotten out alive. “Did anyone see d’Isola?”
“No,” said Rose. “Nor Hannibal. Though in this crowd it’s hard to tell. He wasn’t in the orchestra during the performance. I looked for him from the gallery. Cochon says he was hunting for d’Isola—”
“Cavallo’s dressing-room,” interrupted January. “Cavallo was the one who searched the dressing-rooms. He’s a Carbonaro, he’d have guessed what Belaggio and the Austrians were up to. If d’Isola stumbled on one of the fire-pots in the boxes . . .”
Their eyes met. Then Shaw turned and plunged down the alley, January at his heels, pushing through the crowd that shoved the other way.
“Our friends from Young Italy were one-up on us, looks like,” said Shaw, shedding his coat as they reached the stable-yard gate. “They guessed Knight’d have to meet Belaggio to get his money—which the Opera Society folks would hand over for the slaves—the minute they’s off the stage, whilst everyone else was watchin’ the rest of the dancin’. The slaves all got outa there, by the way, first thing. In them demon-suits they oughta fit right into the crowds all over town tonight. . . .”
The back end of the theater, as Rose had guessed, was dark, the blaze being concentrated around the stage and backstage, where it would drive all witnesses away. Except, of course, thought January, those witnesses who’d chanced upon the fire-pots in their beds of wet clay, the little vessels of paraffin or the hosepipes from the gas-mains set with reflectors, to cast the terrifying glare of fire on the curtains. . . .
He wasn’t the only one who had a horror of a theater fire.
The private door into the passway was locked. There wasn’t much space in the narrow slot for a run, but January and Shaw were strong men, bracing themselves off the rear wall of the stable-yard to lunge forward against the timbers. The wood of the door gave on the first blow— backing off for the next, January saw the place near-by where the cage of dead rats had lain and thought, Pea-nuts. Goobers. Ground-nuts.
Something no one but the daughter of a plaçée, the sister of a free cab-driver of color, would know that rats loved.
No wonder he’d had the buried conviction that no European had been behind at least some of the crimes.
The next second he and Shaw crashed through the door and literally fell over two bodies, curled and crumpled in the little space at the bottom of the blood-stained stairs.
“What the . . . ?” Shaw held his lantern first high, to show the thick black dribbled trail of blood-stains, then low over the horror of bloated dark features and swarming ants. Though it was hot as a chimney in the stairway, there was little smoke. There were black stains on the walls, on the risers, all the way up and disappearing into shadow.
The men were no one January knew. One had been shot, the other’s throat gashed ear to ear with a razor. Neither had been killed here—there was too little blood at the bottom of the stair around the bodies, though the risers were splashed with dull black stains. Both appeared to have been dead for at least a day.
“Well, I will be dipped in shit.” Shaw stood up again. “That’s where they got to.”
“What?” said January. “Who . . . ?”
“This’s the feller got hisself killed yesterday down at the Turkey-Buzzard. I remember that purple jacket.” January, who had climbed a step or two up to examine the black satchel that rested on the stairs, came back now to look. “I knowed the boys at the morgue would pull the teeth out’n a corpse if nobody claimed it, or sometimes cut the hair off a likely woman, but a whole body . . . ! An’ this must be t’other fella that was missin’. Dr. Ker came in this afternoon, said as how there’d been a break-in at the morgue last night. . . .”
“La Scala,” said January, remembering Cavallo’s tardy arrival, his nervousness on stage. He pointed to the bodies. “It’s Cavallo and Ponte.”
“It is not, either. . . .”
“Who will die in the fire, along with the enemies of Italy. I heard Cavallo say to Tiberio, la scala. . . . Which is the name of an opera house in Milan, but which also means the stairway.” He nodded toward the satchel, halfway up the stair. “And now we know what d’Isola stumbled on that got her taken prisoner.”
Shaw and January took the black-stained steps two at a time, passing the other items the conspirators had stowed there—a jar or two of potash, a coil of hosepipe. Metal washtubs and a reflector. And something else, something small that glinted in the juddering lantern-light like a wicked little gold star. . . .
Through the shut door at the top of the steps January heard them: “The man has done us no harm.”
“Not yet.” The thick Sicilian accent was unmistakable even if January hadn’t heard that quick exchange backstage. “The girl—I’ll give you the girl. She is a friend of la patria. She understands.”
Shaw glanced back as January joined him beside the door, gasping in the heat. January mouthed, Tiberio, realizing Shaw knew neither Italian nor Sicilian—
Who else but the little maker of fire, to stage this?
“But I do not go to ground and to hiding—I do not destroy my own usefulness to our friends—to give an Irish drunkard another year to drown himself in a gutter. You understand silence, do you not, Signorina?”
She must have whispered “Yes,” because Hannibal’s weak hoarse voice chimed in with “I assure you gentlemen that I understand silence as well. Why should I concern myself with what becomes of M’sieu Belaggio? What is he to Hecuba, or Hecuba to him? These our actors were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air—”
He broke off abruptly, and Tiberio’s voice continued. “No Irish knows of silence.” There was a pause. “Bring the bodies up, then go. I’ll make sure of things here, and release the girl when I leave.”
Cavallo’s voice was chilly polite. “I think we’ll take her with us.”
“As you please,” said Tiberio indifferently. “If you think you can get away unseen in her company through all the crowd in the alley. But I assure you, if she is seen— and she is difficult to miss, since everyone has been seeking her all night—everything we have done here is for naught.”
There was silence. Pushing the door open a crack, January saw them, a tableau vivant in the amber lamplight of the dressing-room—under whose closed outer door smoke was already beginning to curl. Two jars of paraffin stood near the daybed, on which Drusilla d’Isola lay with her hands and feet bound. Beside her, sitting up but likewise spanceled in the shimmering silk of Princess Elvira’s wedding-veils and Princess Isabella’s bright gold-and-crimson scarves, Hannibal watched the three Italians warily.
“Don’t think you can get away with this,” blustered Belaggio. His hands had been not only bound together, but tied to his ankles, leaving him toppled over beside a similarly trussed Knight on the floor. At the small table, Ponte, still furry-limbed and criss-crossed with scarlet paint, was prosaically thrusting things into a small black bag: the libretto of Othello, two or three green-covered books January recalled seeing in Belaggio’s office. Folded papers, presumably extracted from Knight’s pockets. His mask was thrust up onto his forehead and his large dark eyes were cold. “People will wonder, eh? When they find us tied up like this? People will ask questions. . . .”
“And people will find my body, and
Bruno’s, here beside yours,” replied Cavallo. Sweaty and rumpled from the wig, his dark hair hung down over his broad pale forehead, his dark eyes. He’d pulled on trousers, but his feet were bare, as were his arms in Orpheus’s sleeveless white tunic. “So who is there to hunt? Drusilla . . .” He stepped over to her, bent to brush her forehead with his lips. “Do not think worse of us, Bruno and myself. Sometimes, to slay the tyrants, the innocent”—he nodded toward Hannibal—“must die, too. As my brother died. Please believe me that if he could be spared, he would be.”
Drusilla’s glance went from Hannibal to Cavallo, pleading, then moved on to Tiberio’s hard little gnome-like face. She wet her lips. “Take me with you now, Silvio. I won’t be trouble.”
“Don’t be afraid, Signorina,” said the stage-master in soothing tones. “I’ll see you get out safely.” Glancing at Cavallo, Tiberio added, “Shoot them and go. There’s no time. I’ll see to the girl. . . .”
Or not, thought January, as the case might be.
I am terribly sorry, in the dark of the stair she stumbled, she fell, the smoke overcame her. . . .
Cavallo turned toward Knight, a silver-mounted dueling pistol in hand. “As for you,” he said quietly, “you Austrian lickspittle; you spy. One day my country and the world will be free of your kind forever. . . .”
As these words came out of Cavallo’s mouth, Bruno was already reaching for the handle of the stairway’s secret door. But the young man’s attention—as always—was on Cavallo, and when January whipped the door open, seized Bruno’s wrist, and thrust him into Shaw’s grip, Bruno was far too startled to make the slightest resistance.
Die Upon a Kiss Page 39