“I only have a question or two.”

  “I only have a second or two.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier that your lover, the Kraut, was slated to sing that big solo in New York?”

  “What? The Kliegman Prize? But I am singing it. What is this? I am no longer singing it?” More Italian, what sounded like a string of curses.

  “He says he was supposed to sing it.”

  Her tone changed. I heard a smile in her voice. “Si, but he is not singing it. I am. He made the mistake and it is no more the mistake.”

  The detective’s voice, muffled, sounded frustrated. “When did you learn this?”

  “I do not remember.” Then she laughed. “You think I would kill my dear Ivan because Hans was singing his piece? But I would kill Hans to do that! And if I were to murder the singers in my way, there would be a long line of them, Signor. There is a soprano singing Carmen now, a part that I want. Go look for her dead body. It is the body of a cow. If you think I kill for parts, she is the first on my list. And now, I must go. Ciao.” She closed the door and came looking for me, calling my name. I appeared from the hallway.

  “He is gone,” she said with disgust. “Let us go back—”

  “I need to leave.”

  “Are you afraid of the politziotto? Or of me?”

  “He’s not going to stop, you know,” I said, at last coming to the point of my meeting. “Ivan’s sister is pushing the police to keep the investigation open. It would be closed if it weren’t for her. They’d probably call it as a doper doing himself in accidentally.”

  She tilted her head as if trying to comprehend what I’d just said.

  “His sister is—”

  “Very sad,” I said. “Why do you make her sadder?”

  “How you think that?”

  I gestured around. “Why don’t you get out of his life, move from this house?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “It is my house. I am his widow.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I snorted out a chuckle. “Renata, you know they will find out eventually that there is something wrong with the marriage. You know you cannot keep this.”

  She heaved her shoulders in a sigh. “But where am I to go?”

  “Move back with Hans.”

  She shook her head. “No! He and I are done!”

  “He loves you.”

  “I do not love him.”

  “But you did—once.”

  “Once. Not for very long.”

  Long enough to get to America safely, I thought. How long would she have stayed with Ivan?

  “Find another place to stay—the Belvedere.”

  “Perhaps with you?”

  I smiled. “I’m married now, Renata.”

  “Oh yes. I forget. It is easy to forget your wife.”

  Yes, Renata, you are right. I was all too quick to forget her this afternoon. It won’t happen again.

  “Maybe a hotel? Another apartment? What about that gentleman, the board member?”

  “He is married, the poor man.”

  “Get him to pay for a place for you to stay.”

  “Turandot is in a few days. And then after that, I sing Micaela. And then I leave for New York. Maybe I will not return to sing for you and Signorina Ponselle.”

  So she’d be in the place for maybe a month longer. Carmen was already in rehearsal and would play two weeks after Turandot.

  “Once you leave, don’t make any claims on Ivan’s property. It would only cause trouble.”

  She squinted at me, as if evaluating.

  “I make no claims on anyone, Signor. I only take what I need to live.”

  ***

  On the bus ride home, I let my guilt punish me. It was the booze, I told myself. I shouldn’t have drunk so much. I had to get a grip on that. If I had become Renata’s lover, I’d have lost Laura for good. There was no way Renata would have kept a liaison to herself.

  For one horrifying moment I even wondered if we had made love. But I convinced myself Renata was not a woman I’d forget if I’d had her.

  It was the booze. That was the problem. Laura was right. I needed to cut back.

  But when I drank—I’d conducted some of my best practices after a few early gins. I’d written my Kliegman entry while under the influence of some cheap whisky. I’d played with virtually no pain some of the bravura pieces I used to handle with ease after downing so much vodka I’d lost track.

  So it wasn’t as though I were using the stuff to forget. I was using it to create, and creation is a form of remembrance, isn’t it?

  I closed my eyes. My mouth was dry. Would I smell of her perfume? So what if I did. I’d been in her house. I could explain that.

  I needed another drink. The last one had worn off, the Scotch—or brandy or whatever it had been—she’d given me was fading. Only that dry, sour taste was left, and the clicking gears of a headache a’borning.

  Offer it up, Greggie. That’s what my very religious mother would say to any pain, large or small. Offer it up.

  All right. I imagined lifting an imaginary glass to heaven. Here’s to you, Lord. Here’s my pain, my suffering. Is it enough to let me off?

  The nurses in the hospital had always been impressed by my stoic face, my grim, teeth-gritting silence when they’d tended my wounds, unwrapping the bandages to reveal the mottled mess of moist and rotting flesh. “Mister Silensky,” they would say, “some men have been known to cry when we do this. You are so brave.”

  It hadn’t been courage that had silenced me. It had been resignation. And it had been fear of God.

  Shortly after awakening from the anesthesia and painkillers, I had been visited by Father Warshevsky, my parish priest. He’d offered Communion, but I had refused. How can I take Communion, I’d asked the priest, when my heart is not pure. So, Father Warshevsky had offered Confession. I had started to say the familiar words, “Father, forgive me for I have sinned…” but began to cry.

  The tears had run down my face like a waterfall, and I was ashamed. More so when my father stepped into the room, his sympathy turning to embarrassment. His son crying. His surviving son. I’d killed the other, hadn’t I? With my neglect, with my carelessness?

  Father Warshevsky had blessed me. He had anointed me with Holy Water. He had sat on the edge of the bed with the low angle of the bright evening sun on his back, its intense light bleaching the color from everything—even the white sheets and walls of the sterile hospital room—and he had looked at my father and offered empty condolences. He’d told him, “At least your Grygor survived.” My father had nodded, then tilted his chin in the air, and looked away. When he sat by my bedside, I wondered if he’d rather be elsewhere.

  But of course he had. He wanted to be in the cemetery with Michael. He joined him soon enough, drinking himself into an early grave.

  I opened my eyes and stared at my hands. Sometimes, in a certain light, the purplish scars made them look as if I had blood running through my fingers. They looked that way tonight.

  ***

  When I got home, I was drenched. The bus stop was a good four blocks from my door.

  Laura had the table set with a linen cloth, candles glowing, and something fragrant on the stove. She served me with a sort of determined affection, and after our last sip of wine and my last—and sincere—compliment, she came over to me, grabbed my hand, and led me to bed, making me forget whatever I’d hoped to do with Renata that afternoon.

  ***

  Later, after she was asleep, I slipped back to the kitchen. I cleaned up the dishes and pots and pans—good lord, she’d used virtually every one we had—and then I placed a quiet call to Mrs. Reed.

  She answered on the third ring.

  “I talked to Renata,” I told her. “She’ll be gone in a month. And I don’t think she’ll be going after any of Ivan’s estate.”

  “A month,” she breathed into the phone. “Louise is a determined woman.”

  “Tell her that Renata will be gone—tell her you heard some gossip through Laura.”

  “I don’t want Laura’s name mentioned in connection with that cad’s murder!”

  I sighed. Enough of these coded conversations, everything a secret, nothing said outright.

  “Why do you think Laura did it?” I asked.

  Silence ensued. We’d never said what we both knew she was thinking, what I myself had thought. When she spoke, her voice trembled.

  “My daughter is a very sweet and vulnerable child who has chosen you on whom to bestow her love. I know that she was taken advantage of before she met you. I know she was in the vicinity of the murder. And I know that the murderer was cruel to her. I know that…” She paused.

  “Yes?”

  “That is all I know, Gregory, but it is enough to make me want to do all in my power to keep that … that … creature from hurting her.”

  “Then talk to your friend Louise and let her know that the Italian will be gone soon. Look—say you heard it through Peabody. Renata’s singing in Carmen after Turandot, and then she’s off to New York.”

  *****

  Mary,

  I won’t be home for dinner tonight, so don’t be waiting up for me. I didn’t wake you this morning because you were finally resting so peaceful, and I know the baby’s been giving you grief. Be sure to telephone me if you need help. Don’t worry about bothering me.

  I hope this is the last of the late nights. I’ll be wrapping up one of my cases—the one that’s been going on for weeks now.

  I promise not to be too late.

  Love,

  Sean

  Chapter Fourteen

  A day before the performance and all hell broke loose. First, Hans disappeared. He didn’t show up for the dress rehearsal the afternoon before the big night, and no one knew where he was. Renata coldly suggested I find another tenor to take his place.

  Another tenor—to sing Calaf—on twenty-four hours’ notice? She was crazed.

  But find one I must. The conservatory helped in this regard, placing calls to Rosa Ponselle for recommendations, the dean meeting with me to go over “contingencies”—one suggestion was to have several talented students sing the role in pieces, another was to have someone declaim it. Declaim Nessun Dorm?! I laughed to think of it.

  Upon questioning, Renata suggested that Hans had left because the police were closing in on him. Detective Reilly had been to see him again, she told me in a surly conversation just before our practice.

  “He is so stupido,” she told me, looking at her nails. She’d given up her black and had moved on to wearing dark green, a shimmering iridescent dress that looked like it was woven of fish scales. “Running away—of course they will think he did it!”

  Then, Laura started to go to pieces. It turned out Reilly had been to see her, too. He’d found her at our new apartment that morning before she’d joined me at the conservatory. He’d asked her a lot of questions about her relationship with Ivan. He knew she was “Lucia,” she told me, a desperate shine in her eyes as she tugged at my jacket sleeve.

  “Gregory, you have to talk to him. Tell him again we were together. Gregory, please. Can you call him now—before the practice?”

  I had to excuse her from the rehearsal. She wouldn’t let me be. She was beside herself. I feared a scene. And I myself was late as I made several calls, sitting in the conservatory’s telephone booth in the studio building.

  I called Amanda Reed.

  “Didn’t you talk to Louise? Didn’t you tell her to back off—Renata’s going, for God’s sake. Can’t she be patient?” I explained how Reilly had visited Laura.

  “My God,” she said. I almost thought she’d fainted, the silence lasted so long.

  “Mrs. Reed …”

  “I’m here. I’m … I’m thinking. Perhaps you should take her away.”

  “I have the opera. Besides,” I said, remembering Renata’s words, “taking her away makes her look guilty. It makes us both look guilty.”

  And we weren’t, were we?

  “Hans is the focus…” I murmured into the phone, pressing it against my ear.

  But I didn’t believe he’d done it. Not really. I’d only hoped the detective would focus on him long enough to take the heat off everyone else.

  What did I think really happened? I wanted to believe Ivan had accidentally killed himself. Somewhere deep inside, I’d settled on that explanation. And I’d been able to push aside, using booze and my newfound comfort as Laura’s husband, other possibilities.

  I slumped on the hard bench.

  “Are you still there, Gregory?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to take Laura away.”

  “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “She’s had a nervous disposition. I told you that. She’s always been high—”

  “High strung.” A euphemism for what—willful, childish, insane?

  “Where is she now?” she demanded.

  “I sent her home.”

  “The detective might look for her there again.”

  “I doubt it.”

  But I wasn’t sure. What if he decided to drag in “Lucia” for questioning? What if he was as angry with the Reed and Watts set as I had been before marrying into it? What if he would enjoy bagging “one of their own” as a suspect? God help me, but I would have, had I been him.

  “I’ll go fetch her. I’ll have the doctor come look at her.” Her voice grew stronger.

  “She was quite upset,” I said. “Look, I know someone who might be able to find out what’s going on. Let me see what I can dig up. I’ll call you again.”

  We hung up. I looked at my watch. Rehearsal should have started ten minutes ago. Quickly, I dialed Sal. He wasn’t in. I left a message with Brigitta for him to call me, telling her it was urgent.

  I hung up, reached in my pocket, and downed the last of the vodka left in my flask. Squaring my shoulders, I went off to rehearsal.

  At least there, a problem had been solved. Miss Ponselle, I learned in a note from the dean, had contacted an old friend, a retired tenor she’d sung with at the Met. He was taking the train from New York and would sing Calaf, a role he’d handled dozens of times. He would be available to meet with me to go over the score in the morning. I could give him any special instructions at that time.

  Somehow, I made it through the rehearsal. It quickly became a blank to me. Several choristers asked me about Laura. I told them she was ill, but would be fine. Renata asked, too, but in a snide way, as if to imply that my wife was not as strong as she. She asked me if I’d join her for a drink, but I declined.

  I checked on a few things and went home, taking the bus. Laura had the car. I was in a daze, numb.

  She wasn’t there when I arrived. I expected as much. The car was parked out front of the building, though. So Mrs. Reed must have come and taken her away.

  I was about to telephone their house when the phone rang.

  “Greggie, I know why you called.” Sal’s voice sounded low. I heard the radio in the background. He was trying to keep his family from overhearing.

  “That detective chased away my tenor.”

  “It ain’t the tenor he’s after.”

  My heart sank. I slipped into a chair.

  “Yeah?”

  “Some student’s alibied him. Heard him singing or something the night of the murder.”

  “But he was…” In the stairwell with Ivan. Obviously, they’d discounted my story.

  “So they’re after Laura?” I whispered.

  “They don’t care, my friend. Laura or you. Just somebody to get that Ruxton bitch off their backs. Reilly’s sick of being pushed around by his captain. He’s got a wife about ready to give birth, it turns out. And he just wants to wind all this up so he can get back to his other stuff.”

  Why hadn’t I been more insistent with Renata? If she’d moved out of Ivan’s home, maybe Louise wouldn’t be so agitated. Maybe she would have given up. Maybe Reilly would have been able to tend to his wife.

  “Why’s he coming after us?”

  “Cause you both had motive, opportunity—”

  I heard someone in the background ask who he was talking to.

  “Look, I gotta go. Just be careful. Don’t say nothin’ to nobody. Stay away from that detective, if you can. I’ll call you later.”

  I got off and dialed the Reed residence.

  “Laura’s resting,” Mrs. Reed said. “Dr. Milton came to see her and has given her a sedative.”

  “Laudanum, perhaps?” I couldn’t resist asking.

  “No! Something different.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Suddenly, I wanted her. I wanted my wife. Not to make love to her, but to cry on her shoulder, to have her comfort me. I wanted her to tell me it would be fine. I wanted to hold onto her.

  “Has the detective called?”

  “Yes.”

  My god. I’d expected a “no.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said she was sick and under a doctor’s care and wouldn’t be available.”

  “Did he ask about me?”

  She said nothing.

  “Did he ask about me?” I repeated, more intensely.

  “Yes. He wanted to know if I knew where you were. I said you were probably at the conservatory, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “We were together that night,” I reminded her. “Laura and I—together in a studio. We can vouch for each other, remember?” That was the bargain she’d struck, dammit, and she had to live up to it.

  “We may take Laura away—to a sanitorium.”

  “I’d like to see her!”

  She was my wife! I needed her. They couldn’t just abduct her like this. I was responsible for her, not them.

  “You could stop by,” she said uneasily. “But I’m not sure if that detective isn’t hovering. I thought I saw his car earlier.”

  “How will you get Laura out?”

  “I—I will think of something. Jack will.”

  Jack would call in a brigade of lawyers. And what about me?

  “We were together that night,” I repeated. “We’re each other’s alibis.”

  “Yes. That’s a good thing. An excellent thing.”

 

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