Aria to Death

by Nupur Tustin

  Rosalie’s smile faded, the memory was so vivid.

  She could still hear Mama’s scolding tone in her head and feel Sanyi’s small fist pressing into her palm as he stood by her side, cackling hard. A dry lump arose in her throat. She swallowed it.

  “Mama always found us out because of that.”

  Her eyes filled with tears, but she brushed them aside. Sanyi was gone. Had been these six months. And there was nothing anybody could do about it. She felt the weight of Mama’s letter in her pocket. Gerhard had handed it to her on the ride back from Madame Chapeau’s millinery.

  “It was sent to Eisenstadt,” he said, looking closely at her. “I meant to give it to you yesterday, but what with one thing and another …”

  Rosalie had taken the letter and dropped it unread in her pocket. She supposed she should have said something to Mama about being in Vienna, but …

  Greta’s warm, plump hand closed over one of hers.

  “A guilty conscience does give itself away,” Frau Schwann tightly squeezed the other, head bobbing sagely up and down. They sat in silence for a while.

  Then Greta pointed to the necklace. “I’d have liked to see Sabina’s face when Gerhard offered her a gulden for that.” A cheeky grin spread over her face.

  “But what if she had looked in the hatbox and accused you of stealing it?” The corners of Frau Schwann’s mouth drooped at the thought. “And she could still do it, you know!” Her hand flew to her mouth.

  “Oh, she can look in the lining of the lid all she likes,” Rosalie assured her. “She’ll find nothing.” To think she had outfoxed the woman at her own game! She sat up a little straighter, the very notion going a long way toward restoring her spirits.

  “Nothing but a paste necklace, that is to say. With beads made to look like pearls and paste emeralds. It was a bit of luck finding it, it was so like Her Serene Highness’s necklace. I’d barely retrieved that and pushed the other into the lining in its place when she returned to the cellar.”

  “She’d have a lot more explaining to do if she tried to hurl accusations at our Rosalie.” Greta thrust her chin out. “How she got her mittens on the Princess’s necklace for one thing. Never mind, hiding jewelry in the lining of a hatbox lid for another.”

  “And it is Her Serene Highness’s necklace, there’s no denying it.” Frau Schwann seized upon the explanation. “The design is the only one of its kind as her jeweler will attest. But—” She looked crestfallen again, and this time pressed both hands to her cheeks in dismay.

  “What are we to tell Her Serene Highness when she asks how we recovered it? She’ll never believe Frau Dichtler had anything to do with it. That dratted woman can do no wrong in her eyes.”

  “And what’s worse, Poldi was in on the whole affair, most likely.” Rosalie’s features drooped as well as she recalled the police guard’s presence at the millinery that morning. How could she have forgotten it? “Gerhard says he is Madame Chapeau’s brother.”

  “Well, we have to do something,” Greta burst out. “Do you think she’s going to be content with letting the necklace slip out of her fingers so easily?”

  * * *

  “I did not think to find him dead,” Haydn said, walking slowly around the parlor where the music scholar still lay supine by the desk.

  They had settled Fabrizzio’s widowed landlady in her own cottage. A glass of wine had done much to calm her nerves, and she had agreed to allow them to search her lodger’s rooms before calling for the police guards.

  What he expected to find, Haydn knew not. The operas, perhaps, or some evidence that the scholar had succeeded in retrieving them. At any rate, it had seemed imperative to scour Fabrizzio’s rooms before the police guards arrived to remove the body.

  Luigi stood by the desk, sifting through the papers on it. “It is hardly surprising, given the company he kept,” he responded. “He must have been at work here—doctoring another ‘Monteverdi,’ I imagine—when he was attacked. There is an unfinished Ariadne here. The ink is barely dry.”

  He held the score out behind him. Haydn, crossing the parlor in no more than three strides, plucked the sheets from his Konzertmeister’s fingers. “He mixes modes where even Monteverdi would not,” he commented after a brief perusal of the music.

  The great master had worked in a period of transition when the system of modes was giving way to a newer harmony. And although Artusi, the crotchety old monk, had taken exception to Monteverdi’s experimentation with the old rules, there had nevertheless been a method to his madness.

  “It is supposed to be the lament, is it not?” Luigi asked. “All he had to do was simplify the five-part madrigal. Why go to all the trouble of composing a new lament?”

  “He may not have known quite as much about the great master’s music as he claimed to.” Haydn returned the score to the pile on the desk. The body lay barely inches from his feet, but he had no need to look down at it. The image of it was etched into his brain.

  “I still cannot understand why he was killed? Deliberately, it would seem.” He twisted his head to regard the door in the rear wall, still ajar. “The police guards will say no doubt that the thieves are grown even more bold, forcing their way into homes in broad daylight. But this seems too brutal for …” He expelled a breath, frustrated.

  Luigi harrumphed. “The guards will say anything to shirk their duty. The ruffians he hired must have returned for their money. He either did not have it or refused to pay it, and they set upon him as well. That is all that happened here, Joseph.”

  “But they rifled through his belongings.”

  “In search of something valuable, no doubt.”

  “And yet their search seems to have concentrated upon his scores.” Haydn opened the drawer on the left.

  A ream of paper, such as had been stolen from the convent, was stacked within. Beneath it was a slim roll of bills. He fished it out.

  “How could they have failed to notice this? It is not a lot of money, but it is nothing to sneeze at either.”

  Luigi was quiet. “If he hired them to procure Kaspar’s bequest, they must have realized the scores were of some value,” he ventured eventually.

  Haydn considered the remark. The hired ruffians may have been rough, ill-educated brutes, but it would be a mistake to suppose they were entirely devoid of any kind of intelligence. He inclined his head.

  This brief show of agreement appeared to encourage Luigi, who continued in a stronger voice: “Well then, is it not possible he offered to recompense them for their services with some of the items they had stolen?”

  “I suppose it is,” Haydn conceded the point. “He may have had the means to take lodgings at a comfortable establishment such as this but still not have commanded the resources needed to—” An image of Kaspar’s bruised, raw flesh surfaced in his mind, and he found himself unable to complete the thought.

  “I cannot tell how much money it would take,” Luigi took up the thread of the argument, “but I doubt the fifty gulden he managed to squeeze out of Goretti would suffice for the purpose.”

  “And so they returned to extract their dues.” Haydn stroked his chin. It was a sufficiently plausible argument. He scanned the room and then turned to look at Luigi. “The question is did they find what they were looking for?”

  “The chest they managed to wrest from your arms yesterday is not here.”

  “No, it is not.” Haydn glanced around the room again. Had the old merchant transferred the contents of his Italian chest to the one designed to replace it, then? “The chest Kaspar’s aunt gave us—a shabby affair that originally contained the music—had a false bottom. I was quite sure…” He scratched his head.

  “He must have had a false bottom made in the new chest,” Luigi concluded. “Fabrizzio may have surmised that to be the case when he saw the scores in your hand.”

  “Then the operas are lost?” Somehow Haydn did not think that was possible. Why make such extensive references to Shakespeare’s King Lear if
not to direct their attention to the dusty, shabby, apparently worm-eaten case? He said as much to Luigi.

  “The old merchant may never have possessed the operas,” Luigi replied. “The madrigals would be valuable enough to anyone who recognized them for what they were. And the scenari you discovered in the older chest would serve to eliminate any doubts on the matter.”

  Haydn nodded, but the explanation did not satisfy him. The keys and the leather pouch on the desk caught his attention again. Had the thieves left them where they were or had Fabrizzio been examining them when he was interrupted? Why had he even kept them?

  “It is fortunate that he retained them.” Luigi must have divined his thoughts, for he pointed to the items on the desk. “There can be no doubt who killed Kaspar. And, in his death, some manner of justice has been served.”

  “I suppose so.” Haydn’s tone was resigned. He reached forward and drew the items toward himself. “We had best remove them and all the paper stolen from the convent before the guards arrive. I cannot imagine their presence will lead those men to any other conclusion then the one they’re most likely to arrive at.”

  * * *

  “I knew you would be able to help, husband,” Maria Anna declared as Haydn and Johann delivered a quantity of vellum and paper into Therese’s astonished arms.

  The Kapellmeister and his brother had returned so late, Maria Anna had been forced to put the evening meal back nearly an hour. But she had not uttered a word of recrimination, mollified, no doubt, by the recovery of the convent’s supplies.

  “All recovered from the scribe, I suppose.” Therese lurched unsteadily on one foot but managed to hold herself firm. “I was mistaken, then, about the man we saw with Amelie?” She lowered the stack onto the parlor table and turned toward Haydn.

  Her eyes, a brilliant sapphire, seemed to plumb the depths of Haydn’s soul before turning their gaze toward his younger brother.

  “What man?” Maria Anna asked.

  “The doctor I was telling you about,” Haydn replied quietly. “It was I who was mistaken about him. He was not the scribe, but he knew who the man was.”

  Therese took both his hands in her own. “I should have had more faith in your abilities, Joseph.” Her gaze included Johann in her next remarks. “Reverend Mother Catherine and the entire convent of St. Nikolai will be in your debt forever.”

  “The man should be punished severely. But I suppose the convent will want to keep the entire affair discreet,” Maria Anna said.

  “His role as a forger has been exposed,” Johann replied. “I explained the matter to Her Majesty. But as to punishment…” he shrugged. “He seems to have received the harshest punishment possible. Brother found him at his lodgings, beaten to death.”

  “Beaten to death!” Maria Anna and Therese cried out in chorus. “By whom?” Therese’s question mingled with her sister’s: “Whatever for?”

  “Those are questions I have yet to answer,” Haydn said with a resigned sigh.

  They continued to preoccupy him long after the evening meal was over and the rest of the household had retired for the night. He sat with Johann in one of the rickety chairs in Papa Keller’s barn pondering the matter.

  There had been something amiss about the scene he and Luigi had discovered that afternoon. If only he could lay his finger on what it was.

  “His death should resolve the entire affair,” he muttered. “Yet it seems to complicate matters still further.”

  The steady creaking of Johann’s chair ceased. He raised his eyes from the pages of the journal they had discovered the night before in Wilhelm Dietrich’s worm-eaten Italian chest.

  “How so?” he enquired in so direct and forthright a manner, Haydn found himself floundering about for a response.

  His chair teetered dangerously as he shifted uncomfortably in it. He braced his feet hard against the floor to steady himself.

  “Fabrizzio was so savagely beaten,” he said when his chair eventually stopped rocking. “I cannot believe a mere falling out with the company he kept could have caused such brutality.”

  “A more deep-seated grudge against the man, then?” Johann regarded Haydn, head tilted to one side. “I suppose it is possible. If it was money they were after, they had only to intimidate him.”

  “Moreover, there was a thick roll of notes in the drawer in his desk. Concealed under some papers to be sure. But it could quite easily have been discovered. Why not take that?”

  “The only reason not to would have been if they were interrupted in the midst of their crime. But that seems not to have been the case.”

  Haydn shook his head. There had been no signs of a hasty departure although the music scholar had not long been dead when they had found him. “I am sure we would have heard something had the scoundrels still been within when we arrived.”

  “Is that what is troubling you, brother?” Johann set the leather notebook face down on the table between them. “The disarray suggests the thieves combed through Fabrizzio’s study quite thoroughly. And yet even the most cursory search should have easily yielded the money he kept hidden.”

  “It felt staged,” Haydn said, but the words did not adequately express what he felt. He hunched forward, chin cupped in his hands, elbows digging into his thighs, and gazed into his brother’s eyes. “I have the same sense of unease His Serene Highness experiences when he hears a false reprise or a deceptive cadence in a piece of music.”

  “As though there is more to come.” Johann seemed to comprehend the sentiment. “Do you fear that it is not over, then?”

  Haydn straightened up, placing his palms flat on his thighs. “I fear someone wishes us to think that it is,” he said quietly.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Echoes of Haydn’s comment, uttered so softly it might have been whispered, lingered in the still, warm air within the Keller barn.

  “But what more could take place?” Johann’s voice, rising to a puzzled mezzo forte, penetrated the thick silence that surrounded them. “You have retrieved the quantities of vellum and handmade paper Fabrizzio stole from the convent and divined his reason for doing so. It was he who killed Kaspar. That is clear enough—”

  “Is it?” Haydn interrupted. “Or are we being led by the nose to think that it is? To look no further. To accept the illusion presented to us.”

  “It was his hand on the note that took Kaspar out on the night of his murder,” Johann pointed out. “And was it not at his lodgings that you found Kaspar’s keys and purse?”

  Haydn inclined his head, retrieving a ring of brass keys and a leather pouch, somewhat the worse for wear, out of his jacket pocket. He set the pouch on the table but let the keys hang from his forefinger. They twirled around, revealing a tiny gold key in their midst.

  “Kaspar’s bureau key,” he said, indicating it with a quick tip of his chin. It sparkled and glinted in the flare of light the lantern spread around them. A stray beam struck Haydn’s eye, piercing the dense fog clouding his mind.

  He raised his eyes, meeting Johann’s steady gaze. “Kaspar’s keys hung from his belt. But the gold bureau key was always in his purse.”

  Johann frowned, clearly not seeing the significance of the remark. “Fabrizzio must simply have put them on the ring with the other keys.”

  “But the ruffians had already emptied the purse and discarded it when Goretti found it.”

  Johann’s frowned deepened. “Yes, of course. It must have been with the intent of seizing his keys that they attacked Kaspar.”

  “At Fabrizzio’s instructions, or so it would appear.”

  “Yes— Oh! I see what you mean now. There was no reason for Fabrizzio to have been at the scene at all. He was quite sure of receiving the key, if he trusted his henchmen to do the job properly.”

  Haydn nodded. “Not only that. There was no reason for him to steal an empty purse. Nor any good reason for his stooges to return to the scene of the crime for it. They already had what they wanted.”

  “Ye
t he stole the purse. That much is clear, for you found it in his lodgings. He must have thought the bureau key would be in it.”

  Haydn could not but agree. “So he took advantage of its owner being incapacitated—” A memory interjected. “I could swear he had no conception Kaspar was killed in the encounter when we gave him the news.”

  He leaned forward, oblivious to the unsteady wobbling the motion set off in his chair. “Fabrizzio must have intended to meet with him, Johann. That is why he was at the scene.”

  “Why then did he sign his note with Herr Anwalt’s name?”

  “Someone set him up to it, I fear. Someone who is on the hunt for those operas; who took Kaspar’s keys and thought nothing of planting them in poor Fabrizzio’s lodgings.

  “He must still be looking for the music. Unless”— Haydn’s fingers tensed into a fist as he recalled Luigi’s words—“he has already found it in the chest stolen from us. But I fail to see how…”

  His eyes drifted toward the battered old Italian chest Kaspar’s aunt had given them. Would a man who professed a fondness for The Merchant of Venice be likely to move his most precious belongings into a newly made chest? From the little Haydn had learned of the old merchant, Wilhelm Dietrich, he thought not.

  His gaze wandered around the barn and fell on the old merchant’s journal. He picked it up. “It is too much, I suppose, to expect that he recorded anything about the operas here.” He gave Johann a feeble smile.

  “I have read nothing of greater interest than his torrid dealings with the women he met on his trips to Italy.” Johann pursed his lips. “He seems to have given no thought to his wife ever discovering his guilty secret.”

  “I suppose it was only natural for a man whose business took him abroad so much.” Haydn turned the journal over and perused the script that sprawled carelessly over its stiff, yellowing pages.

  “A woman in Cremona seems to have caught his fancy more permanently,” he said.