The Brahms Deception Read online

  “Don’t speak of it.”

  “But—with all you do for me—”

  He lifted his brows. “Not for you,” he said. He lifted a mocking finger. “For the music.”

  She made an exasperated sound. “Ugo, I know an herbalist—”

  His face darkened, and he put up a narrow hand. “Basta, Octavia. I know Milano better than you do. I can handle it.”

  Octavia sighed. “When you get stern, you sound just like an American, Ugo.”

  “O Dio, no!” His grin returned, and he pressed his palm to his chest. “Not an American!”

  She chuckled and picked up her brush again, but the flicker of anxiety persisted. She hoped his sources in Milan were more reliable than those in New York. She hated to think of him roaming the alleys of the old city, searching. She knew all too well how dark and dangerous the backstreets could be, and had always been. The architecture of the city had changed, but its nature had not.

  When she had brushed out her hair, she crossed to the desk, where she had left her bag with the Mozart score. “Dinner tonight with the maestro,” she reminded him. “Read-through tomorrow at ten, but you don’t need to be there. Do please come to dinner, though, and help me talk to Russell.”

  “Mm,” he said. “Delicious Russell.”

  She faced him, the score in her hands. “And you will behave,” she said. “I want to sing Donna Anna without distractions.”

  “Carissima. I wouldn’t dream of distracting you.”

  “Ha.” She laid the score ready beside her bed and began to untie her robe. “I always feel filthy after I fly. I’m going to take a bath.”

  “Shall I wash your back?”

  “Thank you, no.” As she passed him on her way to the bathroom, she trailed her fingers across his head and gave his curls a tug. “You’re a brat,” she murmured.

  He grinned up at her. “So true. So true.”

  Ugo propped his chin on his hand, gazing at Russell until the conductor’s face reddened and he broke off what he was saying.

  “Maestro,” Ugo purred. “Please. Do go on with your story.”

  Octavia tried to kick him under the table with her sharp-toed Ferragamo, but she couldn’t quite reach. They were dining in Il Principe’s Acanto restaurant. It was a peaceful place, with neutral walls and rich wood trim. Murano chandeliers cast a gentle glow on the nondescript beige of Russell Simondsen’s hair. The risotto alla Milanese had been rich with saffron, and the grilled salmon flavored with basil and bell peppers. Octavia felt relaxed and refreshed. She was eager to begin the three weeks of rehearsals.

  Though Russell’s features were painfully thin, there was something appealing about his fragile physique that housed such a gifted musical instinct. Octavia could hardly wait to sing Donna Anna under his baton. When Russell took the podium, his hesitant manner disappeared. He became a figure of power, a pale, steady flame.

  She knew it was this that intrigued Ugo. She kicked again, and this time her shoe glanced off his shin. His lips twitched, but his eyes never left Russell’s face.

  Russell cleared his throat, glanced at Octavia, and stammered on about the performance of Aïda he had just conducted in Edinburgh. Ugo gave him a brilliant smile.

  Russell said, a little plaintively, “Yes, it may seem amusing. But she simply wouldn’t follow me, no matter what I did.”

  “Russell, dearest, I’m not laughing,” Ugo protested. “I’m simply thinking what an absolute bitch she is!”

  Octavia rolled her eyes, and Ugo smirked at her. She touched Russell’s arm. “Ugo’s right, if a bit crude, Russell. And I promise I will follow every one of your tempi.” She gave him her close-lipped smile.

  He smiled back at her. “We’ll work them out together, of course.”

  She pushed her hair back from her face. She had worn it down, to trail on the shoulders of her white wool suit. She wore a discreet pair of diamonds in her ears and a matching pendant on a thin gold chain that accentuated her long neck. She had taken pains to present herself in the rôle of a young soprano on the verge of a great career.

  She felt certain Russell believed it. He would not be the first.

  Russell was still blushing, but his face was intent as he leaned toward her. “You know, Octavia, Nick Barrett-Jones was our Amonasro. I hope you’ll like working with him.”

  “Ah,” she said. “They say his voice is magnificent.”

  “Well . . .” Russell pursed his narrow lips. “Yes, the voice is good. But his singing—”

  She tilted her head thoughtfully. “A little stiff?”

  “Just not musical,” he answered. When it came to music, all his diffidence fell away. His manner sharpened, and his voice steadied. “He looks well on the stage, and he learns his cues, but he just—” He waved one hand. His fingers were long and spatulate, the fingers of a pianist. “He doesn’t make music.”

  Octavia listened, nodding as if it were all new to her, although she had heard a good bit of it in New York, and before that in Seattle. Nick Barrett-Jones, of course, had not had her advantages—specifically, her one great advantage. His was a career, by all accounts, that would never be more than mediocre.

  She kept all of this to herself, only asking, “How is the alternate cast, do you think? I’ve heard wonderful things about Simone.”

  Simone would be the other Donna Anna. Russell said he had worked with her before and that she was pleasant and reliable. Animated now, he began to speak of the challenges of La Scala’s orchestra.

  Octavia, listening, looked across at Ugo. He had put his head back against his chair and closed his eyes. Russell noticed, too. He interrupted himself, leaning forward with a concerned expression. “Are you all right, Ugo?”

  “Sì, sì, Maestro,” Ugo said. He straightened. “Sto bene! I’m just a little sleepy.”

  “Yes, it’s late. And you had a long flight.” Russell signaled to the waiter. “And Octavia needs her rest before the read-through.”

  “It was a lovely dinner, Russell. Thank you,” Octavia said. As they walked together to the small bank of elevators, she said, “I’m looking forward to the read-through. And to working with you.”

  His ready blush suffused his thin cheeks again. Even his sharppointed nose turned red, and she thought, irrelevantly, how much he must hate that. “I am, too,” he said. “It’s about time you sang Donna Anna.”

  Octavia pressed her cheek to his, one and then the other, then she and Ugo stepped into the elevator. As it carried them up, Ugo propped himself against the parquet wall. “He’s adorable,” he murmured.

  “Ugo, leave him alone. He’s so high-strung.”

  “Would I hurt such a fine musician?”

  “You mean,” Octavia said dryly, as the door opened on their floor, “another fine musician. I don’t want you adding poor Russell to your list of conquests. Let him concentrate.”

  “Concentrate on you, you mean, bella!”

  “That would be nice.” She unlocked the door, and they went in. As Ugo turned toward his room, she said, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  He flashed his smile, very white in his dusky face. “I’m fine, just as I told Russell. I’m just dandy.”

  3

  Che giuramento, O dei! Che barbaro momento!

  What an oath, O gods! What a terrible moment!

  —Donna Anna and Don Ottavio,

  Act One, Scene One, Don Giovanni

  When Ugo emerged from the elevator, he could see the glisten of a cold rain on the pavement of the Piazza della Repubblica. The night doorman started toward him, but he shook his head and walked out through the glass doors to the street, buttoning his overcoat as he went. He stood for a moment, scowling at the cityscape through the haze of rain. Too many landmarks had drowned under waves of modernization. From where he stood, the square, dull towers of contemporary hotels blocked the view of the Duomo. Small churches and open markets and ancient palazzi had given way to office buildings. Even the old La Scala was not the same. The
new theater was larger, enormous really, but its amenities and additions hardly replaced, in Ugo’s mind, the charm of the old one.

  Ugo’s sigh puffed into the cold air and vanished beneath the raindrops. Though his jaw itched unbearably, he resisted scratching it. A crow perched on the façade above his head, and he heard the patter of its heartbeat as it ruffled its feathers against the rain.

  A mouse scurried through the drain beneath the street, claws scraping on rocks and dirt. Ugo sniffed, tasting its sharp small smell.

  The doorman’s pulse was thunder.

  Ugo glanced at him, assessing his possibilities, then dismissing him. What the man had to offer was hardly worth the risk, and the need wasn’t pressing.

  He turned right, toward the city center. As he began the long walk, heat was already building in his spine, a radiant column that flamed through his nerves and flashed along his arms and his legs. The itch of his jaw spread to his chest, and he walked faster, striding along the tangle of wet Milanese streets, splashing through the occasional puddle.

  Octavia sometimes went to an herbalist, a crone who kept her shop in one of the dilapidated buildings beyond the Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio. He had gone to her before, though he never told Octavia. He never mentioned Octavia to the herbalist, either. He didn’t want her associating the two of them.

  Ugo’s mouth filled with saliva, and he spat in the gutter. Curse that man in New York! He knew little about him, except that his name was Domenico. He had never seen him. One of La Società’s hopefuls had been the go-between, had made the delivery, taken the payment. But the source was this Domenico. It was probably not his real name, and he would not be easy to find. But Ugo intended to find him, and when he did, the deceiver would pay for his offense. He would harvest Domenico without the slightest pang.

  Stupid, stupid man. Ugo dashed across the nearly empty lanes of Fatebenefratelli and walked into the Brera district, where he turned south, striding swiftly along the familiar streets.

  His revenge—Domenico’s reward—would have to wait until he returned to New York. For now, he trusted that the old signora had a supply of aconitum lycoctonum, or aconitum vulparia in a pinch. This was Italy, after all. She was a true strega, and she understood the lupo mannaro. She would be prepared.

  Ugo hurried down Via Terraggio and cut through the Piazza Sant’Ambrogio to the cramped street of Via Dolorosa, where the herbalist’s shop huddled, windows barred, between a lawyer’s office and a dry cleaner’s building. The signora would be asleep in her tiny apartment above the shop, but when he knocked—well, she knew what he was. She would answer the door for the lupo mannaro.

  The strega peered at him closely from her darkened shop before she undid the locks and opened the door.

  Ugo smiled at her, and bowed. “It’s all right, signora,” he said. “I have a little time yet. You’re safe.”

  “It’s been years,” she said. Her voice was as dry as pebbles in a jar, and her hair had gone white as sea foam. She opened the door just enough to admit him, then closed and locked it. She wore a chenille housecoat of a style Ugo had not seen in fifty years. She said, “I thought perhaps you were dead.”

  “Ah,” he said. “But as you see . . .” He kept the smile on his face, but impatience quickened his heartbeat. He breathed deeply, trying to slow it.

  The strega saw this, and shrank back from him. Her heartbeat increased. Ugo heard it as a rattle of snare drums, scratching at his nerves.

  “A little time?” the strega quavered. “Not much, I think.”

  He let his smile fade. “È vero. We should hurry.”

  She turned and made her way through her crowded shop toward a back room. He followed her through the fragrant dark. The air was evanescent of forest floors and cave walls and ancient, musty storerooms. She pulled back a heavy curtain and led him past it into a tiny storeroom. She closed the curtain again before she moved behind a small counter and lighted a lamp. It had a shade of dingy yellow parchment that blocked more light than it admitted, but Ugo saw her perfectly in the dimness. Her hands trembled, and the smell of her fear warred with the scents of dried herbs and powdered spices. The counter was littered with boxes and jars. She bent beneath it to bring out a footstool, which she moved to a wall where more containers of various types and sizes lined a half dozen wooden shelves.

  “You have it, then?” he asked, a little roughly.

  “Sì, sì,” she said. She climbed up on the stool, bracing herself against the shelves. She stretched her arm to the very top shelf, and her housecoat hiked up in back to reveal thin legs marked by ropy blue veins. She grunted as she groped through the jumble of things, finally bringing down a brown glass jar with a cork stopper. She climbed off the stool and set the jar on the counter, panting a little from her efforts. “Eccola,” she said. She pulled the cork out, releasing a puff of dust. Carefully, she extracted something from the darkened interior.

  “Is this all you have?” he asked.

  “No. But use it.” She held it out to him, a single twisted stem with dried follicles clinging to it. “Subito, before we make our arrangements.”

  He stripped the follicles from the stem and put three in his mouth, under his tongue. He closed his eyes. It tasted foul, but he was glad of it. The taste spoke of the power of the poison, bane to any other man, palliative to him. He tried to breathe deeply as he waited for his saliva to decoct the first essence of the plant, for the mucosa of his mouth to absorb it. His skin began to cool almost at once, the itching to subside. He could no longer hear the whisper of tires on the street outside, or the chitter of mice in the rafters. When the follicles were soft, he swallowed them and took three more into his mouth. He spread his hands and smiled at the strega. “You see, signora? Nothing to worry about.”

  She grinned suddenly, showing surprisingly good teeth. Her face creased with a thousand wrinkles. “My friend, there is always something to worry about with the lupo mannaro.”

  He took a long, sweet breath, relishing the steadiness of his heartbeat. “And now,” he said. “How much do you have? And how much do you want for it?”

  A quarter of an hour later, Ugo left the shop with a package, wrapped in newsprint, tucked under his arm. The locks snapped shut behind him as he stood in the street, sniffing the air, listening to the monotone hum of constant traffic. Even in the small hours, Milano vibrated with life and movement. He struck out again toward the Piazza Sant’Ambrogio, where he could hail a taxi. He would be safely in his bed at Il Principe before Octavia knew he had been gone.

  It was a point of pride to him that Octavia slept well. In exchange for her company, and the glory of her music, he smoothed her path in any way he could.

  Sometimes, though she would never know it, he watched her sleep. Her head lay in a fan of that glorious hair that reminded Ugo of the halo on a Botticelli angel. Her strong mouth relaxed, the lips going soft as a child’s. Her eyes flickered behind their closed lids, and he supposed she was remembering, dreaming the dreams of centuries.

  He sometimes thought that she might be the reason he had survived so long. Preserving and protecting such an artist—such a woman—was worth it, worth all of it. Any family either of them had was long gone. Loneliness might have overwhelmed them, its weight greater even than the weight of memories Octavia carried. But they had found each other, a strange grace no religion could explain. And whether he deserved such grace or not, Ugo was grateful.

  Lost in his thoughts, Ugo didn’t notice the rusted green Fiat that careened around the corner into Piazza Sant’Ambrogio until its tires hissed against the curb, throwing a fine muddy spray over the sidewalk. It spattered his slacks, and Ugo whirled, clamping his elbow tighter over the strega’s package.

  The back doors of the little car opened, and two men jumped out. Ugo grinned. No doubt they had spotted his Armani overcoat. But these two had underestimated their quarry. He turned and began to run.

  Sant’Ambrogio had already been a thousand years old when Ugo first walke
d through its Romanesque portico. Now he dashed across the atrium and ducked behind one of the twelfth-century columns with their carved Renaissance capitals. He paused to look back, and swore under his breath.

  They had come after him. They looked young and strong, and they charged into the atrium from the piazza, raincoats belling around them. As he looked, one slipped on the wet mosaic, and the other grabbed his partner’s arm to stop him from falling. The one that had slipped, a bald, heavily built man, looked familiar. A second later the two were running again.

  Ugo didn’t feel any particular alarm. He couldn’t transform because he had taken the strega’s herb, but it wouldn’t matter. These two couldn’t know Sant’Ambrogio as he did.

  He supposed he could drop the coat, let them take it and go, but he was disinclined to give them the satisfaction. They had mistaken their victim.

  He grinned to himself as he slipped from column to column, hiding in the shadows, aiming for the narrow stair that led to the upper loggia. From there he could make his way around to the far side, descend again, and hide himself behind the bell tower that loomed beyond the church, a rectangle of stone against the raindimmed stars.

  Ugo slipped down the gallery and in through the side door. The staircase was to his left. The door was closed, but it wasn’t locked. He opened it silently and was about to put his foot on the first wooden stair when he heard the voice.

  The accent was unmistakably English, though neither public school nor particularly common. London, Ugo guessed. Educated, but not aristocratic. Resonant, a nice rich baritone. The speaker was in front of him.

  The voice said, “We have you now, I believe. Ugo, isn’t it? My friends are in the nave, and I’m blocking the stairs.”

  Ugo stopped and glanced behind him. It was true, the two men were standing just inside the door to the church. He looked forward again, peering up at the speaker, but he could see nothing in the gloom.