by Barbara Paul
She finished the Habanera to enthusiastic applause—and to the sound of a few voices chanting Ger-ee, Ger-ee! from the back of the auditorium. Not yet, girls, Gerry thought as she sashayed off the stage; mustn’t cheer yourselves out before the final curtain. Every year new gerryflappers appeared in the audience, fresh-faced young girls eager to join the army of females who worshipped the ground Geraldine Farrar walked on. The ones who’d been around a while knew just when to start the chanting—not too early, not too late.
Gerry’s maid was waiting offstage with a towel and make-up so she wouldn’t have to run up the stairs to her dressing room and right back down again; she had to go back on again as soon as the tenor finished singing his duet with the second lady of the opera. Gerry took the towel and started patting dry the light film of perspiration on her face.
“I hold the mirror, yes?” a familiar voice asked.
“What are you doing, Rico?” Gerry asked, powdering down. “You and Toto and Pasquale—what are you up to?”
“We watch,” he said importantly. “We watch and make certain no more accidents bedevil us.”
“Hold it a little lower—there. How can watching stop an accident?”
“Oh, we are very busy,” Caruso announced. “We check stage ropes and props and scenery—hey, scugnizz’,” he broke off, “what do you do here?”
Rosa Ponselle came over for a hug from her favorite tenor. “Everybody else was staying backstage—I didn’t want to miss anything. Gerry, that was a great half a Habanera.”
“Mm, yes, it took Quaglia a while to catch on. Hold the mirror still, Rico.”
“I think Mr. Gatti and Ziegler are both on the verge of nervous breakdowns,” Rosa remarked. “They’re both fussing around like old mother hens.”
“We all check,” Caruso explained. “We make sure no more accidents.”
“I’ve got to go on,” Gerry said, patting her hair. “Everybody go away.”
They left her alone and once again she directed all her concentration toward her role. In the next scene she got into a fight with one of the chorus women. She’d always liked that part.
Yelling and screaming—all musical, all rehearsed. Women pouring on to the stage, filling the stage, taking over the stage. Geraldine Farrar in the middle of it all, pulling free from the soldier who was trying to restrain her, turning to strike at the chorus woman …
… who wasn’t there.
Without hesitating, Gerry lashed out at a different woman of the chorus—who looked shocked at first but then caught on and played out the incident. It wasn’t art, but it got done.
Eventually everyone left the stage except Gerry and the tenor, the seduction of whom she was to complete in exactly one aria. Halfway through the Seguidilla, she became aware of raised voices backstage. Angry, she started singing louder, causing Maestro Quaglia to raise an eyebrow at her. But the backstage voices didn’t stop, and she could even hear someone running. The idiots—creating a disturbance while a performance was in progress!
Then it hit her. There’d been another accident.
Her fears were confirmed when she glanced off into the wings and saw Scotti standing there watching her worriedly. When next she happened to look off the other side of the stage, there stood Caruso, wringing his hands, anxiety written all over his face. The tenor she was singing the scene with missed a cue, also aware that something was wrong.
Gerry finished the Seguidilla on automatic and rushed off the stage toward Scotti, who immediately wrapped both arms around her and started making comforting noises. “Don’t soothe me, Toto,” she ordered, “tell me what’s happened. There’s been another accident, hasn’t there? How many this time? And how serious? Who is it?”
“Only one, but it is as serious as it can be. She is dead.”
She knew it, she knew it! “Who, Toto?”
“The chorus woman you are supposed to fight with,” Scotti said. “She is not onstage tonight because she is lying dead behind one of the roller curtains.”
“My God.” Gerry was silent for a moment, shaken. “What kind of accident was it this time? Did the roller curtain fall on her?”
“No.” Scotti’s face was full of pain. “This time is no accident. Someone stabs her, Gerry! There is long knife in her heart. This time it is murder.”
Gerry drew in a deep breath. Murder.
“And,” Scotti finished anxiously, “this time we are supposed to know it is murder. The killer, he wants us to know—he wants us to know he is here.”
3
In 1918, the city of New York had done away with the corrupt and inefficient coroner’s office that had been the scandal of city government for so long. And now, two years later, the Metropolitan Opera was seeing the new medical examiner’s office in action. Pathologists and technicians descended on the opera house along with the police; they examined the body and estimated the time of death to be between four and seven o’clock, since rigor mortis was just beginning to set in.
The murdered woman’s name was Teresa Leone. She was a mezzo-soprano from Baltimore who’d been singing in the Metropolitan Opera chorus for four years. Teresa had shared rooms on Bleecker Street with another chorister, who hadn’t seen her roommate since noon. It seemed that Teresa always had voice lessons scheduled for late Thursday afternoons; so instead of making the trip downtown to her rooms and back up again, she was in the habit of going straight from her voice teacher’s studio to the opera house. Pending the voice teacher’s confirmation of the time Teresa had left the studio, the police then set the time of death at around six o’clock.
Teresa Leone had been engaged to marry a publisher of catalogues and Bibles, a prosperous man who’d been in Cleveland for the past three days on business. She had no obvious enemies among the other choristers; Giulio Setti told the police she was one of the least contentious singers in the chorus. Teresa’s roommate said nothing had been troubling her lately; Teresa was, in fact, happily looking forward to meeting the rest of her fiancé’s family at Christmastime.
Every member of the chorus volunteered the information that Teresa’s death was simply the most recent of a series of malevolent acts directed against the chorus; Gatti-Casazza volunteered the opinion that the choristers were understandably upset and were jumping to conclusions. The body had been found by Edward Ziegler, during his ongoing accident-prevention patrol. The two or three choristers who’d missed Teresa while they were getting into costume and makeup, including her roommate, had simply assumed Teresa had dressed early and was waiting in the greenroom. There was precedent for such an assumption.
The police were faced with the problem of finding out whether Teresa Leone’s murder was connected to the earlier ‘accidents’ or whether it was an isolated event. Also, the ostensible suicide of the man found hanging in the chorus dressing room would have to be looked into more closely. There was much to be considered.
Sixteen more choristers resigned.
“Una maledizione,” Caruso croaked. “I say so—do I not say so, Pasquale?”
“Yes, Rico, you say so.” Amato sighed tiredly. “It is still foolishness what you say.”
“Not so foolish. I say something more happens, and I am right.”
They had gathered the next day in Geraldine Farrar’s apartment on West Seventy-fourth Street—Caruso, Amato, Scotti, and Gatti-Casazza. Emmy Destinn had arrived shortly thereafter, demanding her good-luck pendant back from Gerry. “I sing before you do again,” she explained. “We will take turns wearing it.”
Gerry gave her her pendant back. “You don’t really think this will protect you, do you, Emmy?”
“I think we need all the help we can get.” She plumped herself down in an armchair. “Are you serving anything?”
Since it was still morning, the refreshments the maid brought in were coffee and tea and little dainties to go with them. When Caruso had consumed about four thousand calories, he tried to press his ‘curse’ theory again. “Suicide, accident, murder,” he said. “Thi
ngs such as these, they do not happen unless there is curse behind them.”
“Only in opera,” Gerry said grimly. “In real life, there has to be a human hand behind such goings-on.”
Scotti raised an eyebrow. “You think they are all murder?”
“I think we’d be fools not to consider it. I only hope the police are thinking the same way.”
“The police say very little,” Gatti-Casazza remarked. “Only that the knife, it is of a kind that can be purchased anywhere.”
“Not much help,” Emmy grunted.
“Mr. Ziegler finds the body,” Scotti mused. “Why is he the only one who looks behind roller curtain? Perhaps he knows the dead lady is waiting there?”
“Non lo credo,” Caruso objected. “Finding her does not mean he kills her. Me, I also find dead body once! Ten years ago—remember?”
“Besides,” Amato smiled, “it is Mr. Gatti who finds the man hanging in chorus dressing room. Do you also suspect Mr. Gatti, Toto?”
“Cielo! No!” Scotti was horrified.
“Eh, I am only second one to see him,” Gatti said. “One of the scrubwomen, she finds him.”
“Oh?” Emmy said. “I didn’t know that. How did she happen to find him? What is her name?”
“Her name is Mrs. Bukaitis, and I imagine she finds him when she goes into chorus dressing room to clean. I do not know.”
“Didn’t you talk to her about it? Ask her questions?”
“I try to talk to her next day, but she has little English and no Italian. I think she comes from one of those new countries, the ones that used to belong to Poland or Russia?”
“Estonia?” Gerry suggested. “Latvia? Lithuania?”
“Sì, Lithuania. I think.”
“Un momento,” Amato said. “Why does this Mrs.…?”
“Bukaitis.”
“This Mrs. Bukaitis, why does she go into chorus dressing room to clean so near to curtain time? Surely this must be done earlier in day—before the choristers start to arrive?”
“That is good point, Pasquale,” Scotti said. “We must find someone who speaks Lithuanian and ask her.”
“Ziegler did something else besides discover a body,” Emmy said unexpectedly. “He insulted me.”
“Emmy!” Caruso exclaimed. “How?”
“He spoke German to me.”
Gatti spread his hands. “A slip of the memory—”
“No, wait,” Emmy said. “Why German? Everyone speaks Italian backstage. If Ziegler didn’t want to speak Italian for some reason, he would have spoken in his own language—English. Why did he choose German? He knows I do not permit that language to be spoken to me. It was a deliberate insult.”
Nobody had an explanation, and nobody else thought it particularly important. Caruso made a few sympathetic cooing sounds in Emmy’s direction and turned the subject back to the murder. “Why does somebody hate the chorus? What has the chorus done to deserve such treatment?”
“Perhaps it is anarchists,” Scotti said gloomily.
“Oh, Toto,” Gerry sighed. “You’ve got anarchists on the brain. Would you kindly explain to me why anarchists would want to harm the chorus of an opera company?”
Scotti threw up both hands. “Who knows why anarchists do the things they do? Nessun lo sa. All I know is they destroy things.”
“I think it is one murder,” Gatti said ponderously. “One murder, and the other incidents are precisely what they appear to be—one suicide and two accidents. I think we are making mountain out of, uh …?”
“Molehill,” Gerry said. “I hope you’re right.”
Caruso burst out coughing. It was so bad that Scotti rushed to his side, concerned. “Rico? What is it?”
“Cigarettes,” Gatti muttered.
Caruso had recovered from his coughing fit. He wiped his lips with a handkerchief and said, “I do not have one cigarette yet today.”
“Yet.”
“Two each day, that is all now.”
“Really?” Gerry said. “Good for you, Rico.”
“Perhaps Mr. Gatti is right,” Amato said suddenly. “Perhaps there is only one murder—one important murder, that is.”
“Important murder?” Emmy echoed disbelievingly.
“Important to the killer,” Amato explained. “Perhaps all these other ‘accidents’ are arranged to, eh, to lay down the screen of smoke?”
“That is possible,” Scotti nodded.
“And almost impossible to prove,” Emmy commented. “How could we ever know if only one of the killings is significant?”
“We will know,” Amato said thoughtfully, “if they stop.”
The Metropolitan Opera generally held auditions in the afternoons during the regular season; always, a horde of singers could be found pounding eagerly at the doors, unknowns who thought they were good enough to sing at the Met—and sometimes they were. Young Rosa Ponselle had joined the company in just that way, but it had taken her three auditions to do it. At one of them she’d been so nervous she had fainted.
But now the need was for chorus singers. Most of the defecting choristers had been replaced from the pool of standby singers the Met maintained; but there were still a few openings to be filled, and the standby pool itself needed replenishing. The day after Teresa Leone’s murder, Gatti-Casazza was busy practicing his specialty, that of keeping the press at bay without actually granting an interview. That left Edward Ziegler to take his place at the auditions. Ziegler, who attended every audition anyway, was joined in the auditorium by Alessandro Quaglia and Giulio Setti. They’d just dismissed a thin-voiced soprano from the stage with a courteous expression of thanks and were now listening to a young tenor wobbling all over the scale. The Met-employed piano accompanist couldn’t stop himself from making faces.
When the wobbling tenor had finished and the next singer had not yet appeared on the stage, Ziegler said, “I’ve had an outrageous thought. Do you suppose someone could be killing off choristers just to create an opening? Could our killer be a frustrated singer?”
Quaglia laughed humorlessly. “Then why does he kill both men and women? Your frustrated singer would have to have most unusual voice to sing both men’s and women’s parts.”
“Oh dear, that’s right,” Ziegler winced. “Not too brilliant a suggestion—please forget I said anything.”
Setti smiled ruefully. “Besides, the chorus is what they wish to escape from, no? It is only a stepping stone—at least for this chorus. They all think of themselves as soloists who have been denied their rightful place center stage.”
Quaglia grunted agreement; that was one matter on which he and the chorus master were in accord. The chorus had degenerated abysmally from its halcyon pre-war days; now they sang competitively instead of ensemble. No one seemed to know what to do about it. Quaglia blamed Setti; he thought the chorus master should exercise stronger control.
All three men put the recent series of events out of their minds when the next auditioning singer stepped out on the stage. He was a handsome bass-baritone who turned out to have just the kind of voice they were looking for. Unfortunately, the bass-baritone was Greek and didn’t speak a word of English; he’d brought a young boy with him to act as his interpreter. The boy’s English, recently acquired, was not quite the aid to communication it was meant to be; it remained uncertain just how much chorus music the bass-baritone knew. Ziegler suggested they put him on standby until they could determine the extent of his knowledge. The other two agreed.
By the time the day’s auditions were finished, they’d hired two sopranos and chosen three other singers for standby, including the unintelligible Greek bass-baritone, in decisions made more hastily than usual. Not wasting any time, Setti hustled the two sopranos off to a rehearsal room. Ziegler said to Quaglia, “I’ve scheduled a special audition session for Sunday afternoon, Maestro.”
Quaglia nodded curtly. “I will be here.” Of all the conductors at the Metropolitan, Quaglia was the only one who concerned himself with the h
iring and firing of choristers, claiming he’d had too many performances ruined for him in the past by unruly or inept choruses.
“I do hope the police don’t dally in their hunt for the killer,” Ziegler said as he stood to go. “Conditions will never return to normal here until they find him. The chorus will undoubtedly use the murder as a bargaining point when next they ask for more money—they’re not overly burdened with ethical considerations, I’ve found.”
Quaglia looked startled. “Do they not just get new contract?”
“That won’t stop them,” Ziegler said sourly. “I had to give them the sun and the moon this time—next time they’ll want the stars as well. I’m sure they’ll ask me to renegotiate this last contract, as soon as one of them thinks of it.”
“Mmm. The longer these incidents continue …”
“The more intractable they become. Well, perhaps the killer is finished now—let’s see what happens during Parsifal.”
Nothing happened during Parsifal. The lengthy Wagnerian opus went off without a hitch; there were no accidents, no suicides, no murders. Even the normal backstage problems that plagued every opera production were less troublesome than usual. But any hope that this uneventful production would help allay the choristers’ fears was soon dispelled; most of them were quick to point out that this was a German opera that had escaped being sabotaged. To the non-German segment of the chorus, that was further proof that the German singers at the Met were exempt from and possibly responsible for the unsettling series of incidents that had been taking place. The chorus remained as divided as ever.
Pasquale Amato was not thinking of the chorus; he was thinking of what an incredibly lucky man Antonio Scotti was. They’d both been singing for over a quarter of a century, but Amato had never had a beautiful soprano buy him a fur coat for Christmas.