A Cadenza for Caruso (11 page)

They were back to Puccini. “He is not coming, is he?” Caruso said, looking at his pocket watch. “I worry about him, Pasquale. Last night he said something about killing himself if those forged letters are made public.”

“Ah, well, he is under stress. People make extreme statements when they are under stress.”

“But he has thought of suicide before! Right after Doria died—when it looked as if Elvira would go to prison. He blames himself for what happened.” Caruso shook his head in wonder. “He blames himself!”

Amato nodded, seeing the composer's point of view. “Puccini is one of those people who turn their anger inward, who punish themselves instead of hitting out at others. If he were going to kill anyone, he should have thought of killing Elvira for making so much trouble. But he still loves her in spite of everything—he does, you know. And his own hands are not completely clean. So whom does he punish? Himself.”

“I do not understand that at all,” Caruso muttered. “People hurt you, you hurt them back. You do not hurt yourself
more
.”

His friend smiled. “Puccini is a very complicated man—he does not have the direct response to life that you do, Rico. In a way, you are better equipped to survive than he is. Puccini would be more likely to kill himself than an enemy like Luigi Davila.”

“So how can Lieutenant O'Halloran think he is guilty?” Caruso proclaimed loudly, attracting the attention of three or four other diners.

Amato turned his palms up. “Your Lieutenant O'Halloran does not know Puccini the way we do. And even if he did, it would probably make no difference. Policemen do not think the way other people do,” he finished trenchantly. “All they care about are clues and evidence and matters of that sort.”

Caruso snorted. “So what do we do? What do
I
do? How do I help Puccini?”

“Do?” Amato shrugged. “What is there to do? I see nothing you can do—unless you find the real killer yourself.”

Caruso let a smile spread slowly across his face. “Ah. Aha.”

“Rico?” Amato said, alarmed that the tenor had taken him seriously. “You are not thinking—”

“Yes,” Caruso nodded, his smile now full-blown. “That is what I do. I find the real killer myself.”

“Rico, don't be crazy! You cannot solve a crime the police themselves are having trouble with!”

“How do you know I cannot solve a crime? I have never tried before.”

“And you are not going to try now! Be sensible. You are a
singer
, not a detective!”

“Perhaps I am detective too. I have more than one string to my bow! I am a versatile man,” he proclaimed proudly, liking this image of himself. “I can improvise when I need to. It is like singing a cadenza, Pasquale. You take charge of the music yourself.”

Amato threw up his hands, got up from the table in annoyance, and left the tenor to pay the bill. Caruso carefully wrote the amount down in his notebook.

7

“He wants to do
what?!
” Emmy Destinn was astounded.

“He wants to give us kissing lessons,” Caruso said apologetically. “Mr. Belasco says we are not doing it right.” What he'd actually said was that
Caruso
wasn't doing it right—but no need to tell Emmy that. “Let us indulge him, Emmy,” Caruso grinned. “It might be fun!”

Emmy rolled her eyes and walked away.

Caruso was in a more cheerful frame of mind than he'd been in earlier in the morning. When he and Amato arrived at the Metropolitan, they'd found Puccini already there, a new look of determination on his face. “I will see this through,” he'd told the tenor. “I survived before, I can survive again. I will fight this ignominious accusation!”

“And I will help you!” Caruso answered enthusiastically. He was delighted with the composer's new attitude—that, coupled with his own resolution to
do something
, had got his juices flowing again. There was only one small problem.

How did one go about solving a murder?

Maestro Toscanini wanted to start out with the third and final act of
Fanciulla
, the one in which the chorus figured so prominently. It was the point in the story where the miners turned into an ugly lynch mob, and Caruso was the man they wanted to hang. David Belasco was on the stage, trying to convince the unwieldy chorus to show more restraint.

“You must learn the value of
repose
on stage,” he was saying. “No more unmotivated actions, please—no shrugging your shoulders, no grimacing, no gesticulating with your hands. Do you understand?”

The fifty chorus members responded by nodding vigorously, shrugging their shoulders, and gesticulating with their hands.

Belasco tried again. “The men who settled the Old West were an uncommunicative lot. They did not give away their feelings through gestures and facial expressions. Some of you tend to make faces, and all of you wave your arms too much—whenever you feel like it, it seems, regardless of what's happening in the story. You must be more reserved, like the Westerners you portray.”

“
Simple
men,” Toscanini said helpfully, “for whom Puccini has written the appropriate music. You sing in unison or in octaves—no sophisticated harmonies for you! Be
simple
. Listen to Mr. Belasco, do as he says.”

“Ben volentieri!”
“Sure thing, Maestro.” The men of the chorus started moseying off the stage at Belasco's gesture of dismissal.

Caruso went up to the stage director. “I do not think Emmy is too happy about practicing the kiss.”

Belasco was unperturbed. “I'll speak to her later.” He watched the last of the chorus trail off into the wings. The first time Belasco had seen the chorus make its entrance, he'd been appalled. Tenors and baritones and basses had trooped out onto the stage by the score, lined up in rows, and turned themselves into an arm-waving backdrop for the soloists. “If they would only stop
wriggling
,” Belasco lamented. “There's something you and Mr. Amato need to rehearse,” he said to Caruso, “but it will have to wait—I think Maestro Toscanini is ready to begin.”

The rehearsal started, and Caruso was surprised to see Puccini watching from the wings instead of his usual place at the back of the auditorium. The chorus members proceeded to work themselves up into a lynch mob ready to slip a rope over the tenor's head. Then it was time for
Ch'ella mi creda
—the first aria Caruso had ever sung that ended with his neck in a noose.

The aria was short and relatively simple, but Caruso loved it so much he gave it all he had. When he'd finished, the chorus burst into thunderous applause punctuated by cries of “Bravo!”—even though there was no break in the music at that point. Caruso fully expected a roar of outrage from the orchestra pit, but even Toscanini was clapping his hands.

In the wings, Puccini nodded approval. Caruso wanted to gesture modestly but his hands were tied behind his back. “Such a beautiful aria!” he called to Puccini. “Singing it is like a caress to the throat. Exquisite!”

“Ah yes,” the composer said dismissively. “But it's so
Puccini!
”

“Now that we've stopped,” Belasco said, walking back out on the stage. Toscanini was delivering an impassioned lecture to the orchestra's horn section, so Belasco used the time to work out a little stage business. At the end of the aria, Pasquale Amato was supposed to slap Caruso; the other times they'd rehearsed it, the slap had looked phony—because the baritone had pulled his punch, not wanting to hurt his friend. Belasco showed Amato how to swing his extended arm so the tips of his fingers missed Caruso's nose by a bare inch or so. Then he showed Caruso how to jerk his head to the side at just the right moment so it would look as if he'd been hit hard.

“But there is no sound that way,” Amato objected. “The audience will know it is fake if there is no sound.”

Caruso pretended to be hurt. “Do you really want to slap me, Pasquale?”

“There will be sound,” Belasco assured them. He positioned one of the chorus members out of sight in back of Caruso and told him to clap on cue, showing him how to cup his hands to produce a louder sound. The three of them practiced the slap until Belasco was satisfied.

“We continue!” Toscanini cried.

Emmy Destinn marched out onto the stage. “When do I get my horse?” she demanded.

“Final dress rehearsal,” Belasco told her.

“That is not enough time.”

“Madame Destinn, you ride in and dismount immediately. One rehearsal with the horse will be enough.”

“I do not like horses. I will need more time.”

“
If
you please!” Toscanini bellowed. “We worry about your horse later, yes? Right now we
sing
.”

The soprano stalked off. The music started. Emmy walked on majestically, not deigning to pantomime riding and dismounting. The opera called for her literally to come riding to the rescue. She'd talk the miners out of lynching Caruso (she'd
sing
them out of it, rather); and
La Fanciulla del West
would end with the girl and her bandit lover going off arm-in-arm into the sunset. A happy ending—unusual for a Puccini opera.

Belasco had divided the large chorus into smaller groups and gave each group different stage movements. Unfortunately, the chorus members not only had difficulty remembering where they were supposed to move on what cue, they also kept forgetting which group they were in. Every time they made a mistake, they waved their arms to make up for it.

When the act was ended, Belasco separated the dozen worst offenders from the rest of the chorus and gave them special instructions. “Put your hands in your pockets and keep them there,” he told them. “The whole time. The audience is never to see your hands. Can you do that?”

“It will be hard,” one of them said earnestly.

“I know,” Belasco sighed. “But try.”

Toscanini announced a lunch break.

“Do not lose heart,” Caruso said to Belasco. “They will learn to be still.”

“They were still while you were singing
Ch' ella mi creda
,” Belasco remarked. “I don't suppose you know anything about mass hypnosis, do you?”

A man Caruso didn't know was talking to Pasquale Amato. The tenor heard Amato say, “Yes, he was here the entire afternoon.”

The man said something Caruso couldn't make out.

“Well, of course not
all
the time,” Amato replied shortly. “I was rehearsing, I had other things to attend to. But he was there, in the back of the auditorium.”

The unknown man was from the police, then—checking on Puccini's alibi. Suddenly there seemed to be several unknown men walking around the stage and the backstage area. They were talking to the chorus members, Emmy Destinn, the other soloists, even Emmy's maid, Sigrid.

Caruso planted himself downstage center. “Lieutenant O'Halloran!” he sang out. “Where
are
you?”

“Back here, Mr. Caruso,” came the now familiar Irish voice from the back of the auditorium.

Caruso peered into the darkness at the back and could see nothing. Then O'Halloran stepped out into the light and started down the aisle; Caruso left the stage and hurried to meet him. “Well, Lieutenant, are you convinced Puccini is here all of Monday afternoon?”

“I'm convinced he could have slipped out at any time without anybody noticing,” O'Halloran growled. “Look at this place! It's black as pitch back there under the overhang—even an owl couldn't see him from the stage.”

“But every time the lobby door opens there is light. And his cigarette—yes, his cigarette! That is how I know when he is here—I can see the cigarette glowing in the dark!”

“That's how you know
when
he is here?”

“
That
he is here,
when
he is here—English is such an unbending language! You know what I mean.”

O'Halloran shook his head. “Won't do, Mr. Caruso. Your friend could have been here Monday the whole time. Or he could have been gone an hour without being missed. That's all it would take to get to Davila's rooms on Irving Place, kill him, and get back here. One hour.”

Caruso had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He'd once seen the outside of the prison they called the Tombs; it made him sick to think of Puccini shut up in that cold and forbidding place. “But he was here,” he said despairingly.

“He does not want to believe that, Caruso.” Puccini was coming up the aisle toward them. “He has made up his mind that I killed that man, and nothing is going to budge him. Isn't that right, Lieutenant?”

“Now, I didn't say I'd made up my mind, Mr. Puccini. My men are still questioning the people here. But so far we haven't found anyone who was watching you the whole time. But we're still investigating. The knife Davila was killed with was his own, by the way. He was using it to peel an apple—we found it on the floor.”

“The letters,” Puccini said tightly. “What does your handwriting expert say about the letters?”

“Inconclusive. Our man compared the letters written by your wife to the ones we found in Davila's office—and he says he doesn't
think
they were written by the same person. But he's not willing to swear to it in court. Says there are too many questionable passages. But even if he did testify that those letters are forgeries,
you
still wouldn't be in the clear, Mr. Puccini. Your wife could still be hurt by new suspicions—and so could you. Those letters spell trouble, authentic or not.”

Puccini asked quietly, “Are you going to arrest me?”

O'Halloran shrugged. “That depends on the district attorney. If he decides we have a case, he's going to present all the evidence he has at the inquest and ask for a verdict of willful murder. And I mean
all
the evidence, Mr. Puccini.”