1 - Interrupted Aria

by Beverle Graves Myers

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “We found the door ajar. You can see someone’s forced the lock.” Caterina indicated the splintered doorjamb. “I’ve already knocked on doors and questioned the other inhabitants of the house, but no one saw or heard anything.”

  “I wonder if the intruder got what he came for?”

  “We’ll never know if we don’t make our own search,” Caterina answered.

  The four of us set to work. We decided to sort the late soprano’s possessions into different categories: books on the table, letters and personal papers on the desk, clothing on the bed, and so forth. Only then would we be able to make sense of the mess. I found myself working in the bedroom with Susannah.

  “Are you still convinced of Felice’s guilt?” I asked her as she folded shifts and corset covers.

  The little maid grimaced uncomfortably. “My new mistress says Signor Viviani is behind the murder, but I know what I saw. If your friend didn’t poison the wine, I’d like to know what he was doing in Signora Belluna’s dressing room.”

  “I would, too,” I admitted as I crawled over the carpet scooping everything from shoe buckles to hair combs into a large hatbox. “I suppose there is no chance that you would renounce the affidavit you signed for Messer Grande?”

  “How can I, Signore? If Messer Grande thinks I set out to deceive him, there’s no telling what he would do to me. Besides, I told nothing but the truth.”

  The truth: what an elusive concept that was proving to be. I shivered on my tower, knowing I needed to exercise my voice before the performance but loath to seek the warmth of the theater until I had mulled the new developments over. After hours of sorting and picking through Adelina’s things, we had not found a shred of helpful evidence, and Susannah could be sure of only one missing item.

  She described a thick, folio-sized book bound in red Moroccan leather. “My lady used to write in it for hours. She’d come home from the theater and prop herself up in bed with that book. ‘Go to bed, Susannah,’ she’d say. ‘Just leave me a pot of coffee and I’ll be fine.’ The next morning, there’d be candle wax all over the nightstand, but the book would’ve disappeared.”

  “Where would she have kept it?” asked Caterina, surveying the premises with impatient eyes.

  “I don’t know,” Susannah answered with a shrug. “She had hiding places even I didn’t know about.”

  “That means the book could still be here, hidden in some secret space that has eluded both the intruder and ourselves,” wailed Annetta in frustration.

  “Do you have any idea what she was writing?” I asked the maid, who sank onto the dressing table bench with an exhausted sigh.

  “Not really, but it seemed to make her happy. From my room, I’d hear her chuckle and sing little bits of music. Mornings after she’d been at the book, she’d seem quite pleased with herself.”

  Caterina and Annetta had thrown themselves on the bed among the neat stacks of clothing that Susannah had erected. All three of the women groaned when I proposed going over the apartment again, bit by bit, to look for a secret hiding place. I brought them to their feet with a graphic description of the machine used for execution when the Tribunal ordered a prisoner strangled. By the time I had reached the part where the victim’s head was strapped in a crescent-shaped collar and the executioner was using a winch to slowly tighten a skein of wire around the unfortunate neck, my weary allies were tapping floorboards and examining the undersides of the furniture. Using hat pins, tweezers, and every other implement a fashionable lady’s boudoir could provide, we poked and prodded every potential crack and recess in the place. It was all to no avail.

  “Such rotten luck.” My whisper joined the tendrils of mist swirling around my tower like ravenous spirits. “Why can’t fortune smile on our quest just once?” I pulled myself away from the parapet. It was definitely time to head for the theater. The low murmur of the monks at their evening service accompanied me as I crept down the spiral stairs in near darkness, plotting my next move. The Palazzo Viviani was uppermost in my mind. I couldn’t imagine gaining free rein to prowl over the huge residence in search of the red leather folio, but at least I could question some of its inhabitants. Of course, the book might be at the bottom of a canal by now, but maybe not. Domenico Viviani had amassed his fabulous wealth through cunning and attention to detail. He would want to examine any potentially damaging information himself. The red book might be sitting in a desk drawer at the palazzo waiting for the master to read it at his leisure.

  As the curtain at the San Stefano rose, I forced myself to put my musings aside and concentrate on the job at hand. Over Juno’s run I had warmed to my role as Arcas and enjoyed singing Orlando’s score. Adelina had described it as a repetition of his earlier work, but it was new to me and presented certain charms. The libretto afforded me several opportunities to strike heroic or moving poses, and I made the most of them. There were only two discordant elements.

  The first was Orlando Martello. The composer was growing bored with conducting the orchestra from the harpsichord. He complained incessantly and paid little attention to the action on stage, leading to many slips between singing and accompaniment. He bragged that he was working on a new opera that would be Venice’s most magnificent spectacle yet. If Torani or one of the other theater directors wouldn’t offer favorable terms to mount the production in Venice, Orlando threatened to sail for England and offer it to His Majesty’s Opera Company at the Haymarket.

  Marguerite was a different story. The singer was neither old nor young, neither beautiful nor ugly. She made an impression by the stateliness of her bearing and the sheer strength of her voice. Her soprano could be shrill and graceless, but the pit never dared hiss her because she was known to have several powerful protectors who were particularly ruthless even by Venetian standards. Her lack of virtue didn’t concern me—I left that to the gossips—but her stage behavior plagued me. So strong was her penchant for superiority that she used every trick of our trade to overshadow her fellow singers.

  Her vanity forced me to develop a few clever tricks of my own. When she pirated my favorite embellishment for use in one of her own arias, I countered by repeating the phrase with ornamentation she could never hope to match. I doubled her trills, pushed past her high notes, and sustained single tones for triple the length of hers. The audience loved it.

  It was after one of these vocal duels that I realized I could put my stage success to work in my investigation. The roar of the pit was deafening as I made a reverential bow in the direction of the Viviani box. My patron had skipped the opera that night, and Elisabetta was entertaining a bevy of titled ladies. They were crowding each other at the box railing, applauding wildly.

  “Maestro Torani,” I called as I came offstage, “I’m going to pay my respects to Signora Viviani. I’ll be back in plenty of time for my next entrance.” The director looked surprised but didn’t try to stop me. I fancied he thought the adulation was going to my head and I was turning into one of the willful, arrogant virtuosi who were more interested in being fawned over than singing.

  The spacious Viviani box overflowed with feminine charm. The ladies’ skirt hoops clacked together as they shifted from the rail to card table and back again. The enclosed space reeked with their competing fragrances and the mess one of their lap dogs had made under a chair. Besides the footman who was cleaning up after the dog, the only male in the box was Elisabetta’s castrato attendant. I learned his name that night: Benedetto Benaducci, shortened to Benito by everyone. Dressed in a rich suit of scarlet moiré with a lining of sky-blue silk showing at his cuffs and collar, he carried his lady’s fan and handkerchief in jeweled hands and bantered with her guests in a sweet, seductive lisp. I owe him a debt; Elisabetta and her company complimented me shamelessly, but Benito was the only one to suggest an invitation to the palazzo.

  “Ma cara signora, our handsome nightingale should not be caged in this theater. He should be wa
rbling in your audience chamber.” When she nodded her head and told me she received guests on Sunday and Thursday afternoons, my entrée to the palazzo was assured.

  I left the theater in better spirits than I had entered. One goal was in sight, and I hoped that when I reached home Annetta would tell me that Brother Mark had been called to hear Felice’s confession. I hadn’t covered more than one square’s distance from the stage door when another worry popped up.

  After leaving Adelina’s apartment earlier in the day, I had noticed a knife grinder’s cart outside her building. Not an unusual sight in a residential campo, but my instincts told me I’d seen the man before. My interest was further piqued when the same cart showed up in the market next to the Benedictine monastery. From my tower roost, before the mist had engulfed me, I had studied the cart owner’s movements. His rolling gait and habit of hunching his left shoulder would be unmistakable.

  There he was again. He had been waiting at the mouth of the alley that ran by the theater, this time without his knife grinder’s implements. I slipped on a mask and directed my steps from campo to campo in aimless fashion, like a man seeking pleasure but unsure of where to find it. My shadow never wavered. With his cap pulled low to shade his face, he kept well back, but never let me leave his sight. My only other companion was one of Alessandro’s Turkish daggers, which he had given me after I had been attacked at the Colleoni statue. I moved it to my waistband for quick access.

  Uneasy at the prospect of leading my shadow home to the Campo dei Polli, I strolled toward San Marco’s. A stiff wind off the Adriatic had blown the evening mist over to the mainland. The night had turned clear and cold, but the spirit of Carnival, and a multitude of large braziers, warmed the great piazza. A dizzying parade of costumed revelers surged to and fro, pushing frantically from one entertainment to the next, always seeking a bigger thrill. I stopped to watch a troupe of acrobats catapult onto each other’s shoulders from a teeter board set on the ground but was soon diverted by a juggler who was keeping three lighted torches in the air at one time.

  My shadow’s rolling gait followed close behind me as I made my way down the piazza. When I stopped to buy a cup of smoky black coffee from a vendor who was roasting his own beans at the back of his stall, the faux knife grinder turned to inspect a notice board announcing the arrival of an Egyptian contortionist. I suddenly realized that I was ravenously hungry and looked around for a place to eat. I didn’t think I’d be attacked in the middle of a crowded café, so I joined a stream of masqueraders heading for a brightly lit doorway down a narrow calle just off the north side of the piazza.

  Instead of food, I found a large building of interconnecting salons filled with gaming tables. Masked men and women jostled around tables throwing dice, playing faro, or betting on the wheel. This must be the Ridotto, the state-sponsored gambling house, not what I wanted at all.

  I had turned to go when a tall, straight-backed man in a bauta caught my eye. Surely that was my father’s coat. I had noticed him wearing a patterned green taffeta many times. I slipped behind a thick column to get a good look without being seen. I watched as the man laid wager after wager on the spin of the wheel. The tall stack of coins before him shrank inexorably, yet he continued to lay coins on the black or red squares like an unthinking, mechanical being. Murmurs of “Bad luck, Signore” and “Better try your hand at faro” reached my ears. One woman grabbed his arm and tried to tease him into leaving the table. He shook her off without taking his eyes off the wheel.

  He seemed to come back to life only when the stack of coins had dwindled to nothing. He patted his pockets, and his masked eyes scanned the crowd as if looking for someone. Could this really be the Isidore Amato who insisted on a thousand small economies in the household, who wouldn’t give Annetta an extra soldo to hire another servant, who had kept me on a meager allowance all my years in Naples? It was hard to imagine the thrifty father I had known squandering money at the gaming tables, but I was almost convinced of this man’s identity. I wished the cloth of the bauta wasn’t covering his wig; I would have recognized that without doubt.

  Wondering what my shadow was making of my behavior, I followed the man in the green coat as he strode quickly from room to room. On the mezzanine, he entered a particularly sumptuous chamber lit with a wide chandelier and many extra candles. He hesitated on the edge of a group gathered around a richly dressed man who stood out all the more because he was one of the few unmasked men in the establishment. It was Domenico Viviani. I watched as the man who I thought was my father tried to catch his attention. A waiter hung at my elbow, inducing me to buy a glass of Cyprus wine. I had better start spending some money or the management would be ushering me out onto the street.

  I gave the fellow an extra coin and posed a question. “Who is that man pestering Signor Viviani?”

  “I don’t know his name, Signore,” the waiter answered. “He is always masked.”

  “Does he come here often?”

  “Yes, several times a week,” he said, scurrying away with his coin as if he had told something he shouldn’t.

  My supposed father was desperately signaling the nobleman.

  Viviani seemed to recognize the man despite the mask. He allowed him to step forward and cautioned, “Make this quick.”

  My ears strained to hear their low-toned discussion. It was no use, but I didn’t dare move closer for fear I would be recognized. My Moor’s mask was more of a carnival trinket than a real disguise. If the man was my father, I didn’t want him to catch me spying on him. I became aware of the approach of several large men who had been lounging against the wall: Domenico’s bodyguards. They had noticed my interest in their master and were coming to investigate.

  I backed quickly out of the room, ran across the mezzanine, and swung over the rail of the low balcony. I landed clumsily, but upright, on the ground floor. The punters at the tables were so consumed with the passions of the cards and dice that my odd behavior drew little interest. As the Viviani bravos leaned over the railing with bewildered looks, I slipped my mask into my pocket and blended into the dense crowd.

  The salons were as packed as the piazza outside, but the mood inside was much more restrained. Decorum demanded that the gamers conduct themselves with poise and elegance. It was considered bad form to show excitement or agitation at the tables, so fortunes were won with only a hint of a triumphant smile and lost with barely a trace of chagrin. Still, Venice took her gambling seriously. As the Republic’s maritime ventures steadily waned, the populace turned to games of chance to provide the delicious intensity it craved. After all, what was sea-going trade but a momentous gamble? To consign a galley laden with valuable cargo to treacherous waters swept by sudden storms and infested with pirates was pure speculation. Past generations of Venetians had risked their lives and their fortunes to create an island paradise of unequaled splendor. My generation seemed intent on throwing it all away for the fleeting rush of excitement on the throw of the dice.

  I was still hungry and more than ready to leave the Ridotto. I couldn’t detect my shadow anywhere, and grave matters awaited me at home. I was heading for the door when I felt a soft touch on my arm. Whirling swiftly, I found impish green eyes staring out from behind a black velvet oval.

  Signora Veniero lowered her moretta to reveal a delightfully intimate smile. Her hand was still on my arm. “How is your luck tonight, Signor Amato?”

  “My luck is usually better than most. Even so, I don’t put my trust in it,” I replied, returning her smile.

  “Where does your trust lie, then?”

  I considered a moment. “My eyes, my ears, my hands. Things that are real.”

  She moved her hand down my arm and took my hand. Raising it to her mouth, she put my forefinger against her lips. I felt her warm tongue on my fingertip, then the gentle scrape of her small, white teeth. “This hand, Signore?”

  The crush of bodies around us, the smell of burning wax and strong perfumes, my ow
n hunger, all dissolved into nothingness at her touch. Unaccustomed warmth flooded my belly and rippled southward. All I could do was nod.

  She cocked her head to one side. “I hope you’re not losing your voice again?”

  “No, Signora,” I managed to whisper. “Tonight my faculties will not fail me.”

  My hand was still in hers when a large man in a bauta laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. His cloak was a fine grade of silk and his boots had a military cut. I knew this possessive admirer was not her husband as his fleet was still in Cyprus, but his garb suggested he was a patrician and an officer in the Venetian navy. As I stepped back to make a reluctant parting bow, a flutter of white hit the floor. I scooped up the delicate handkerchief of lace-edged lawn and pressed it in Signora Veniero’s hand. I kept the tightly folded paper that she passed to me in my fist until I was back out on the piazza.

  I nearly ran to the nearest brazier and used its light to read her invitation to a rendezvous the next evening. The appointed place was a house near the public gardens on La Giudecca, an island to the south of the city that was popular for recreational excursions. This time there was no trick; the lady had given me the message by her own hand. I felt almost as light as I did when I was swung above the stage on a wire suspended from the rafters.

  As I pushed through the crowd toward the gondola mooring, I could have been bouncing instead of walking. My head was full of amorous imaginings, but my hand stayed on the hilt of Alessandro’s dagger. I was not quite love besotted enough to overlook that I had traded a mock knife grinder with a sailor’s walk for a ferrety little follower in a bird mask.

  Chapter 21

  “Which one do you want, Signor Tito?” Lupo asked, holding my two most presentable shirts aloft for inspection.

  I ran the linen through my hands. Both shirts were fraying around the neck, but one was in better shape than the other. It also had the advantage of having undamaged Flemish lace at the wrists. “This one will have to do,” I answered.