lapsed back, trembling, head to the side once more, and all of it was coming clear to him with a stunning perfection.
The stage, the endless talk of his beauty and his skill at illusion, that he was woman incarnate before the footlights, and those hands, those horrid and dreadful hands, and the skin!
He felt the nausea rolling up from his stomach. He clenched his teeth against it and exerted all his will not to panic, not to thrash about, not to give her the satisfaction of it. But he couldn’t stop the roaring, the moaning, from coming between his teeth.
Her. She! He closed his eyes, shuddering. Sickness overcame him. He swallowed and shivered with it. And when he opened his eyes again it was Tonio, most surely, holding that great French wig of pearls and white hair in his hands.
The smile was gone from his face. His eyes were glassy and wide and amazed.
He pulled off the black bodice as if it were armor. The skirts, untied, dropped to the floor.
And there, in crumpled white shirt and breeches, hair moist and disheveled, stood a giant of a feline man. There was a stiletto tucked in his waist; there were jewels on the handle, and as he stepped out of the discarded taffeta finery, he adjusted that stiletto with one of those long hands.
Carlo swallowed. The taste in his mouth was rank, and the silence shimmered between them now like the vibration of a thin wire.
For a long time, they looked at one another, this cold-eyed demon with the face of an angel and Carlo, who now very slowly gave an ugly, soft laugh of his own.
He passed his tongue over his lips.
Dry, sore, a crack forming down the middle of the lower lip from which he could taste blood.
“My men…” he said.
“…are too far away to hear you.”
“will come…”
“…not for a long, long time.”
And it came back to him dimly, those steps going higher and higher. And he had said to her, “But there’s water running somewhere, I can hear it, the canal has broken through….”
He could smell the canal. And she, the bitch, the monster, the demon, had answered, “It doesn’t matter. There is no one living here….”
No, no one in this house to hear him, this great crumbling old house.
And in this room with the fire blazing, he had gone to those windows for air and with his own eyes had seen not the street with his men waiting and watching, but, some four stories deep, the dark well of an inner court! They were in the heart of it, this building, and she had let him see it step by step!
Oh, it was too perfect, too clever.
Sweat was drenching him. And after this one I sent a pair of crude murderers. The sweat ran down his back and under his arms. He felt his hands moist and slippery though he did nothing with them, save open and close them, open and close them, struggling against the panic again, the urge to struggle when this oak chair would not yield an inch.
And how many times had he instructed Federico to give him a wide berth with women, how many times had he warned him not to rouse him from any beds?
It had been staged beautifully, and it was no opera. And he had said: “He’s a eunuch, they can strangle him with their bare hands.”
He watched Tonio seat himself at the table opposite, his white shirt untied at his throat, the light playing on the bones of his face, every movement suggestive of the giant cat, the panther, an eerie grace.
He felt hatred in him, dangerous hatred, attaching itself to that face, that perfect face, and to every detail that he saw, to all the things he had ever known and suffered to know about Tonio, the singer, Tonio, the witch before the footlights, Tonio, the young and beautiful one, the famous one, the child reared by Andrea to every blessing and indulgence under that roof all those years while in Istanbul he raged and raged, Tonio, who had all of it, Tonio whom he had never escaped, not for one moment, Tonio and Tonio and Tonio, whose name she’d cried out on her very deathbed, Tonio who had him now, despite the knife and those long weak eunuch limbs, despite the bravos and a life of caution, helpless and captive now.
If he did not let it out in a great roaring cry, this hatred would drive him