6 - Whispers of Vivaldi

by Beverle Graves Myers

  “Tedi hasn’t been in, perchance?”

  “No, not for some time.”

  I told him about her departure for an Alpine spa. The stage manager merely rolled his eyes and muttered something about “perfidious females.” Then he pressed the office key into my palm. “Perhaps you’ll see something I didn’t.”

  “I need to look through Torani’s scores.”

  Aldo whistled under his breath. “What? All ten thousand of them?”

  I nodded. “I’ll need some time—preferably away from prying eyes and without danger of interruption.”

  Pushing on his knees, Aldo rose from the stone wall. His last words were low and pointed. “Come to the theater tonight then—Ziani has been burning the candle at both ends, but he should be out of his workshop by eleven at the latest. I’ll be waiting at the stage door.”

  I didn’t move right away, merely watched Aldo saunter up the pavement with his usual bantam rooster strut. Had my old enemy really become my friend?

  ***

  I eventually scrambled to my feet, dusted off the tails of my jacket, and directed my steps toward home. But not before wiping my neck with my handkerchief as a cover for sending a discreet look in every direction.

  At several points during my conversation with Aldo, I’d had the uncanny sensation of being observed, that prickling at the back of the neck that forces you to turn and scan the scenery behind you. Scarface hadn’t followed us, and I’d identified no one on the canal or the pavement who didn’t seem to be going about his day-to-day duties. Besides, the stage manager and I had been talking softly in the open air. No one could have possibly overheard without giving his presence away. But as I entered the Cannaregio, the feeling of being watched returned emphatically.

  My neighborhood consisted of long, straight canals bordered by wide pavements, a gondolier’s dream. Connecting these main thoroughfares were slender threads of water crossed by bridges of wood, stone, or iron. I stopped in the exact center of one of the crooked bridges that doglegged into the intersection of two calli. The surrounding three-story houses rose straight up from the water, framing a rectangle of sky. Against that pale canvas, gray clouds scudded in shifting layers. I propped my back against the bridge’s iron railing and gazed upwards as if assessing our chance of rain.

  I feigned that pose for some minutes, keeping my expression unconcerned but my muscles expectant and tense. If any lurker had business with me, I was handing him—or her—a very tempting invitation.

  No one responded—and it really did look like we were in for a storm.

  Pushing more deeply into the Cannaregio, I decided that one of Messer Grande’s spies must have been detailed to keep a discreet eye on me. My foray into Peretti’s coffee house had proved disconcerting in more ways than one: it was obvious that at least some of my musical comrades were taking it for granted that I’d killed Torani and would soon be arrested. I had to wonder exactly where I stood on Andrea’s present list of suspects.

  Fat raindrops bounced off the pavement just as I came in sight of the house. I ran the last few yards. Liya heard me jiggling the latch and came to open the door herself. A strand of her long black hair had escaped her chignon, and her eyes looked weary.

  “Where’s Benito?” I asked. Since my manservant was no longer needed to care for my costumes at the theater, he had taken on more responsibility around the house. Minding the door was one of them.

  “Come into the sitting room, Tito.”

  One candle burned there, on the table where Liya had been studying her cards. Instead of being laid out in their usual neat array, the brightly-colored rectangles were scattered across the tabletop as if a child had been playing with them. One had fallen to the floor. I returned it to the table—a winged angel pouring water from a pitcher into a chalice of wine. From previous discussions I knew this card represented Temperance and Harmony.

  I could use some of that.

  My wife clapped her hands for the maid, and the girl stepped in from the hallway. Liya told her to bring wine, and after a sharp glance at me, a plate of bread, olives, and cheese.

  “Liya…” I began uneasily. I craved the normalcy of home, but the atmosphere in the house felt decidedly wrong. Even the shadows gathering in the corners seemed to harbor some somber secret. Where was Benito?

  “He’s gone,” Liya told me, once I’d flopped down on the tapestry-covered sofa.

  “Gone?”

  “He packed a bag and left around noon, not long after you did.”

  “But…where did he go?”

  “I asked him, of course, but he insisted on being mysterious. Benito absolutely refused to explain where he was going or why—only stressed that I’m to tell you that he pledges to return with information you will find beneficial.”

  “How can he make such a pledge?”

  Liya shook her head. “His last words were, ‘I will find answers for my master or die trying.’”

  Dio mio! My heart became a tiny hammer, pounding my ribs with a staccato beat. It went on as the maid crept in with her tray and Liya pressed a glass of Montepulciano into my hand. First Tedi, now Benito. While Tedi’s desertion struck me as a betrayal, Benito had obviously formulated some misguided, spur-of-the-moment, overwrought plan to help my situation. What and where, I couldn’t immediately fathom. Oh, Benito, I thought, what kind of trouble have you started? I bowed my head and mumbled a prayer for his protection. What else could I do? Sending after him would do no good. He’d been gone for hours, and his trail would be cold.

  As Liya moved about the room lighting more candles with a tightly twisted length of paper, I calmed gradually. The hiss of the wicks catching fire melded with the patter of rain sounding on the shutters. I took a sip of wine and let its warmth fill my mouth before swallowing.

  “Your face is so gloomy,” Liya said, as she kicked off her shoes and settled beside me with her legs drawn up under her skirts. “Are you in pain?” She touched my chest lightly. “I must redress your wound.”

  “It’s all right.” I moved her probing hand away.

  “Is it Benito? You mustn’t worry. He knows how to take care of himself.”

  She was right. My manservant had shown himself to be resourceful in a number of ways—God had given him the gift of dancing between raindrops without ever getting wet. Perhaps I was needlessly anxious.

  “Well, did you discover something upsetting while you were out in the city?” Liya asked. Her black eyes, slanted sidelong and illuminated by candlelight, gave off an eerie gleam.

  “You be the judge,” I challenged and began to recount my afternoon’s activities. When I reached the part where I entered Maestro Torani’s study, I remembered his letter that I’d stowed in my pocket. I quickly retrieved it, then broke the seal on the outermost paper that had been folded around three inner pages scrawled with my mentor’s loosely sloping hand.

  Wine glass abandoned, I read Torani’s last letter aloud with Liya’s head snuggled into my shoulder. He must have written it while I was away in Milan, because it began thusly: “My dearest Tito, My heart is heavy and my head confused. Whether you return with Angeletto or not may matter little. Powerful forces are arrayed against our Teatro San Marco, forces that a tired old man can no longer gather the strength to fight. If you are reading this, I am gone—to a happy place far from Venice, or more likely to the dark and mysterious fate that we will all face in time. I have much to reproach myself with and hope you will not despise me if my actions have led to the demise of our beloved opera house. Forgive me, my boy.”

  I glanced up with a puzzled grunt.

  Liya stirred beside me. “What does he mean, Tito?”

  “I only wish I knew, my love.” I heard my own voice tremble as I considered which forces he could have been referring to.

  Settling back down, she murmured, “It’s almost as if he had a presentiment of his
own death.”

  I nodded, scratched my cheek where Liya’s hair was tickling it, and turned to the next page. It was a list of instructions Maestro Torani had set out in the event that the San Marco survived. My mentor clearly assumed that I would don his director’s mantle. I sighed. What would he think if he could know that Rocatti was now in charge of the enterprise he had tended for over a quarter of a century?

  The third page held a more personal message. “Heed me well,” I read. “Tedi calls me an old fool. She speaks the truth. I’m vain, exacting, and over full of pride. Ambition bedevils me—I may as well be honest. Many times I squeezed and pinched you like a boot a size too small. Or otherwise held you back by tying myself to your coattails. You must forgive all this, too. I cannot change my nature. This is the important thing I want you to remember: Although I have no father’s claim to you, indeed, I love you as my true and only son. My dearest wish is that you recall our shared years with happiness.”

  He’d signed it with a flourish and an embellished Rinaldo Torani.

  “Oh, Tito,” Liya breathed.

  I stared at the words on the page so long that they ran together and became as meaningless as chicken scratchings. Then I hugged my wife with both arms and tightened my grip as if I were girding us both for battle.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Liya had extracted a promise that I wouldn’t go to the theater alone. She had never liked Aldo any more than I had and didn’t trust him. With Benito gone, there was only one person for the job of helping me search Maestro Torani’s office: Gussie. My brother-in-law was always ripe for an adventure, and there had been precious little excitement in his life of late.

  I arrived at the house on the Campo dei Polli—the house that had been my and Annetta’s childhood home—just as my sister was taking the children upstairs to bed. Isabella squealed when she saw me. She wiggled out of her mother’s grasp and fastened herself onto my leg. Now I had two more females to convince of the necessity and gravity of my mission to the theater.

  Pulling at my cloak, my niece begged to come along so she could view the kitten that soon would be hers. Isabella was easily put off by a sugar stick that I’d tucked in my pocket for just such an emergency. Not so Annetta.

  As Gussie donned cloak and tricorne, my sister crossed her arms and fixed me with a stare. Her brown eyes held a stubborn look I knew well. Once she’d absorbed the details of my suspicions about The False Duke’s true composer, she said, “Let me see if I have this right. You’re going out into a dark city filling up with all manner of scoundrels bound for Carnival, trusting a man who’s been jealous of you for years, and crossing a patrician who would see you thrown under the Leads without batting an eyelash. Correct?”

  “Annetta, I have to—”

  “I know,” she cut me off and heaved a sigh. “Don’t forget that I was around when you first sang on Torani’s stage. I know how you felt about the old man. Just…please…don’t allow your zeal to cloud your judgment. “And,” she paused to run a possessive hand over Gussie’s shoulder and arm, “take care of my husband.”

  “You have my promise, Sister.”

  Annetta saw us off with kisses. A peck for each of my cheeks, and a long, deep one for Gussie.

  ***

  Venice never slept. Well, perhaps you could argue that my city drowsed during the worst of the summer heat, when the wealthy made their annual villeggiatura to cooler mainland estates. But a deep, snoring, head-buried-in-pillows sleep? Never. Gussie and I had plenty of company on our walk to the theater.

  We began by circling the Campo dei Polli, where the bright, three-quarter moon shone on several men smoking long clay pipes around the central well that supplied the square with drinking water. They were bundled in cloaks against the chill, picking over matters of the day, their heads wreathed in gossamer threads of pale smoke. Above, several women murmured from balcony to balcony. Gussie and I didn’t speak until we were hurrying along the Cannaregio’s canal-side fondamenti where I advised him of Maestro Torani’s gambling debts and their consequences.

  Gussie had been minding the uneven paving stones; now his gaze slewed to me. “That rather widens the field of possible killers, doesn’t it? I’ve heard that many of the private casinos are owned by cash-poor second and third sons of patrician stock—men with little to fear from the authorities and plenty of bravos at their disposal.”

  “You’ve heard correctly. But Torani’s valet reported that Tedi had paid the old man’s debts with money raised by selling her jewels.”

  Gussie pulled a face. “Tedi must be frightened, though. What else would drive her from Venice before Maestro Torani has even been laid to rest?”

  “I’m thinking her sudden journey may have something to do with the object of our search. I don’t know how or why—every time a piece of the puzzle comes into focus, another piece becomes blurry—but I also believe that The False Duke somehow bears on the murder.”

  We paused on a wooden bridge to watch a large gondola lit by lanterns, fore and aft, slip by. It was headed toward the heart of Venice, but the feathered masks of its chattering occupants and the mist rising off the water lent the pleasure boat an air of a barge bound for fairyland.

  As we started down the bridge’s steps, Gussie changed the subject. He spoke with uncharacteristic tartness. “Tito, I know Benito is devilishly clever and capable and all that, but disappearing on this impulsive jaunt without securing your permission…” He trailed off and shook his head disapprovingly.

  “Italian servants can be unfailingly loyal, but they’re not nearly as stuffy about it as your English ones.” I had this on firsthand observation. I’d spent one exceedingly damp and dreary London season singing at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Never again! “Italians have considerably more imagination and a definite independent streak. Benito must believe he’s doing me a service.”

  “But you didn’t tell him he could set off on his own? Even by implication.”

  “No.” I scratched my head as our long legs ate up the pavement. “At least I don’t think so. This morning seems like ten years ago. We talked of the murder, of course, and we both had our pet suspicions.”

  “Suspicions of whom?”

  “Majorano, Angeletto, Caprioli. You mark my words—Benito will return one of these fine days, having inveigled a deep, dark secret about one of them. Perhaps the secret will be useful. Perhaps not. But it will be true.”

  Gussie shook his head. “I’m just glad I don’t have to contend with such an unpredictable servant.” Once he’d settled in Venice, my brother-in-law had dismissed his severely correct valet and never hired another. Gussie actually seemed to relish dressing himself and didn’t mind that his yellow hair often resembled an untidy haystack.

  He fell silent as a man and woman in concealing bautas passed by with their veiled hat brims nearly touching. Husky, amorous whispers reached our ears, then Gussie said, “I’ve thought of a service I could do you, Tito.”

  “You’re doing one now.”

  In the dark, I felt, rather than saw, his smile. “Something else,” he replied.

  “What’s that?”

  “I want to paint Angeletto’s portrait.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “There is no better way to know…him…or her, damn it. Over the time it takes to paint a good likeness, the artist becomes intimate with his sitter—whether the subject intends it or not.”

  “You still believe Angeletto could be a woman? Even after Grillo as much as admitted that the story of their lovemaking was a whopping falsehood?”

  We’d entered the Campo San Bartolomeo near the Rialto. The pavement was more crowded there, and I couldn’t hear Gussie’s reply over a large group of raucous Germans singing snatches of popular songs.

  He raised his voice. “I believe my eyes, Tito. She’s pretending, using masculine gesture and stance, but n
ot totally at ease with it.”

  “I can think of at least ten men who naturally move with a woman’s grace—one of them is Benito.”

  Gussie shook his head firmly. “As I live and breathe, Angeletto is a woman. She is! I’d like to prove it to you.”

  “Until then, could you indulge me by using the masculine pronoun?”

  “If you wish,” he replied stiffly.

  We’d caught the Germans’ attention. They pressed close, hemming us in, all wearing identical white masks with rounded cheeks and blunted noses. Standing on tip-toe, their leader shoved his pig-snout into my face and demanded directions to a certain notorious casino. After we’d pointed the way, he tried to fill our hands with foreign coins. We tossed them on the stones for the ever-present facchini and went on our way. What did the ill-behaved foreigners think Gussie and I could do with their paltry thalers?

  By the time we’d reached the campo on the landward side of the Teatro San Marco, I’d given Gussie permission to do as he liked about Angeletto’s portrait. Against my better judgment, I admit. His unshakeable belief was based in part on his attraction to the singer. Was it a good idea for him to be spending long hours of portrait-sitting with Angeletto? I’d acquiesced because Gussie was so keen. He’d formulated the idea of announcing himself to the singer with the news that an anonymous admirer had commissioned the portrait—not an unlikely event in a city which was still being swept by castrato fever. Public gondolas were now flying pennants devoted to their boatmen’s favorite singer, and on the Merceria, shops were selling ladies’ fans and garters adorned with miniatures of Angeletto, Majorano, and even Emiliano.

  I’d said yes, also, because I truly doubted that the Savio would allow Gussie to even talk with the singer, and certainly not to have a sitting within the confines of the Ca’Passoni. Signor Passoni knew very well that Gussie was part of my family.

  The theater square was deserted. With no performance scheduled, it would be unlikely to be otherwise. Balls and dinners and other entertainments had drawn the crowds elsewhere. As Gussie fell back to follow me down the narrow slit that led to the opera house’s stage door, a score of church bells rang out, tolling the hour. Eleven o’clock. We climbed the stairs, and I gave the thick planked door a double thump with the side of my fist. It creaked open.