Masques and Murder — Death at the Opera 2-Book Bundle Read online

  Dedication

  For her love of opera and exceptional skill with languages, not to mention her unconditional support of all my endeavours, this book can only be dedicated to my wife and favourite travelling companion, Vicki.

  Overture

  Across the small pond, the trees had turned spectacular shades of yellow, orange, and red. The contrast with the scattered green of the pines could truly take your breath away. Autumn didn’t get any better than this in eastern Ontario.

  The man turned away, walking the few feet back to a house under construction. Somewhere in the forest a crow cawed loudly, breaking the late afternoon silence. Contemplating nature, unfortunately, had to drop to the bottom of the list — at least for the next little while.

  He stood at the end of a very long road. Searching, waiting so long to catch sight of his quarry, had strained nerves to the breaking point. So much rode on what would happen over the next ... what? Ten minutes? A few hours? Even a day or two?

  What did it matter? He’d waited patiently for this opportunity, and he could wait a bit longer.

  Of course, it had always been possible to move on, give up, do something else, but what he needed to accomplish was too important for that. If he could pull this off, then he’d be a made man. He shook his head at the irony of his thoughts. What did they always say? “The world will be your oyster.” Yes. That was it. He could hardly wait to taste that oyster.

  During his long search, every variable had been calculated to the finest degree possible. He knew what he needed to do, and he knew how to do it. Now all that remained was the final bit of waiting.

  Carefully, he risked a quick glance through one of the empty holes where windows would soon have been placed, listening to the swish, swish of the long grass in the lower field as his target approached from the driveway beyond the old log house. As an incredibly subtle alarm, it worked perfectly.

  He faded back into a darkened corner to wait. The half-built house around him made the man feel as if he stood in a forest of naked saplings. In a few minutes, that forest would be a mass of flames, consuming itself long before help could arrive, covering his tracks. It would appear as if the whole sad episode had been a horrible accident.

  Nothing could go wrong now, even though the man knew his target was smart and resourceful.

  It had all been planned out too well.

  Dying isn’t hard. I’ve done it over a hundred times — more than one opera critic has deadpanned that Marta Hendriks can die with the best of them.

  The performance of La Traviata that evening at the Metropolitan Opera was going quite well. It had been a huge break for me to get my first leading role with this storied opera company. My manager had pushed the Met hard to give me this chance, since they’d always looked on me as no more than a competent second-stringer. “Get Marta Hendriks. She’s reliable and does a good job in supporting roles.”

  Three nights earlier, my first performance had not been everything I’d wanted it to be. It wasn’t until late in the second act that I’d gotten my nerves under control. Even though I knew how much my career counted on giving my very best, I just didn’t accomplish what I’d set out to do. Next day, I’d been too chicken to read the reviews, but I found out plenty quick. Bad news travels fast in the backstage world.

  Tonight, though, was a different story.

  Giordano Friuli, my Alfredo, had been on his best vocal behavior ever since the conductor had raked him over the coals for holding his dramatic moments far too long. My voice felt supple and strong, leaving me to concentrate more on my acting, something the New York critics seemed to find woefully lacking in the first performance.

  Consuela, my dresser at the Met, had been fussing over my wig before the third act (and my big death scene), when someone knocked on my dressing-room door. She cocked an eyebrow questioningly.

  “Better see who it is,” I told her.

  “Is she decent?” asked a basso profundo voice I recognized at once.

  “Always decent for you,” I called out.

  Bernard Laliberté, the Met’s general manager, swept into the room as he was wont to do, always seemingly in a hurry.

  I thought he’d stopped by to wish me good luck or something, or maybe to ask if I’d like to go out for a spot of supper after we’d finished. Singers are always ravenous after a performance — one cause of the weight problems that dog most of us.

  “Bernard!” I began, swivelling my seat. “How nice of you to come and see me.”

  Something seemed to be wrong with his face, but he quickly papered it over. Perhaps Friuli was acting up again. The course of a general manager’s life in America’s biggest and best opera house is seldom a smooth one. Singers are volatile creatures.

  “I came up to escort you to the stage.”

  “Whatever for? I know perfectly well how to find my way down.” I grinned at him. “Is this a new service at the Met for sopranos? I’m so touched.”

  Laliberté seemed on the verge of saying something, but merely held out his arm. “Is she ready?” he asked Consuela.

  She shrugged and stuck another hairpin in my wig for good measure.

  I should have twigged that something was up when we exited the elevator at stage level. Everyone turned to look. I remember thinking that maybe my performance so far that night had been even better than I believed.

  Jeremy Cross, the Met’s long-time stage manager, came over to tell me that they were ready to begin the act, and I could hear the orchestra out front making their usual getting-ready tootling noises. He glared at Laliberté as he led me to my mark, another thing out of the ordinary. I lay down on my side on the bed at the rear of the stage, waiting for the curtain to go up. The mattress smelled of dust even though the linens were spotlessly clean, so I turned my head up to avoid breathing in any crud. The evening’s Annina (Violetta’s maid) scurried out dangerously late and plopped down into the overstuffed chair where she was supposed to be asleep. She turned her head away from the audience and stared at me unnervingly, too.

  In the wings, Laliberté and Cross seemed to be having words. Behind them, three or four stagehands stared out at me intently. The audience applauded from the other side of the curtain, the conductor struck up the band, and we were off.

  As operatic death scenes go, Violetta’s death in Traviata does take quite a bit of time, but being one who gets to sing this glorious music, I’m not complaining. The poor girl’s expiry could go on all night for all we sopranos care.

  There’s a long aria at the beginning of the act for Violetta as she wakes up and is visited by her doctor. Since she’s in the final stage of tuberculosis, I didn’t have much acting to do but stagger from the bed over to a sofa and portray, through voice and action, how very weak the poor girl is supposed to be — while still being heard at the back of the theatre — which is a good trick, when you think about it. The big wind-up for Violetta is when Alfredo arrives, not knowing he’s seeing her for the last time, and they get to sing their damn fool heads off.

  Friuli was in the wings early for once, and instead of his usual nervous pacing as he waited for the cue for his entrance, he glared at me with such ferocity that I felt I should check my body for burn marks.

  At this point, I finally began feeling uneasy. It couldn’t be my performance that was attracting everyone’s attention. It had to be something else, but what? My focus began to slip as I sang the lovely and poignant aria about how Violetta feels her life coming to a close. The libretto, which I knew as well as any, was drifting out of my head. I struggled to bear down, relying on the prompter more than usual.

 
I regained my equilibrium when Friuli made his entrance. We’d been singing rapturously together all evening, drawing energy from each other’s performance, but all of a sudden the tenor was holding me stiffly, almost at arm’s length instead of pulling me in as he usually did.

  This threw me completely, and when he let me go, I was shaking so much that I no longer had to act like I needed to sit down.

  Once again, Friuli had to sweep me up at a touching moment in the opera when Alfredo realizes just how sick Violetta is, which quite often makes me dewy-eyed. There is a little bit of musical interlude here, which gave me the time to seemingly stumble, allowing me to turn away from the audience.

  “What the hell is going on?” I growled at Friuli.

  His answer came out low and angry. “How can you be doing this? Are your veins running with ice?”

  I had to sing again, so there was no time to ask him what he meant, but a cold fist seemed to be closing around my heart. My breathing was uncontrollable and my heart raced.

  When Alfredo’s father, Germont, made his entrance, I had a brief moment to hurriedly whisper to Friuli, “What are you talking about?”

  “Did you not love your husband, that you can go on singing when he has just died?”

  I staggered back as the weight of his words slammed into me. Now the meaning of those puzzling stares had a razor focus, and I was certain beyond doubt that what Friuli had told me was the truth. I spun to look into the wings and there was Laliberté. The expression on his face confirmed everything. Of course he knew and had deliberately kept this horrendous news from me so that I would go on and finish his damned performance.

  Turning away, I gripped the chair, almost pulling it over. As the final moments of Traviata fell to ruins around me, I somehow managed to croak out my next few phrases through a rapidly tightening throat. Stuck where I was, what could I do? I just tried to keep a grip on things.

  But when Barry Wheeler, playing Germont that evening, hugged me into his arms, I finally crumbled completely, forcing him to try to sing with the full weight of my body dragging him down. He is a big man, but I am not a small person, and I’d taken him by surprise.

  By this time, everyone in the audience knew something was wrong. My next cue was to hand Alfredo a locket, and I almost managed it, but when I turned to look at Friuli, it wasn’t his face that I saw.

  My husband Marc stared at me across the stage at the Met, looking as he always did: head cocked to one side, a sardonic grin on his face, body slouching, broadcasting to the world that he just didn’t give a damn about anything.

  I took one step, then another, holding my hands out in front of me as I strove to reach him. If I could just touch him, I felt sure he wouldn’t really be dead.

  The orchestra kept playing as I missed one cue and then another. My fellow singers tried to keep going.

  That night was an operatic train wreck of monu-mental proportions. Marc began to fade — or was it my consciousness slipping away? I called out. Some say I almost sang it; others say it came out as a choked scream. All I know is that I hit the stage hard. The side of my face was still bruised two weeks later. Everyone agreed that it was a collapse worthy of any opera, but no one had the courage to tell me that until nearly a year later.

  Brief vignettes of the remainder of that terrible evening still float around in my head like bubbles of oil in a sea of water: lying on the stage with some stagehand’s smelly coat under my head, a hastily-summoned doctor taking my pulse and shining the beam of a small light into my eyes, the wailing scream of an ambulance on the trip to the hospital, whispering voices all around me, and finally an injection, its brief sting bringing sweet oblivion.

  Chapter One

  Tonight was my night — for the first time in nearly two years.

  Though I was usually calm before a performance, the thought of what I had to accomplish before the curtain came down at the end made my hands clammy and my legs wobbly. My heartbeat had been through the roof all day. These are not good things for a dramatic soprano who desperately needs to give a good performance.

  No. Correct that. Not a good performance. A great performance. My job this evening was to make it crystal clear to everyone in the Palais Garnier in Paris that I’d come back from the abyss.

  Once upon a time, I’d been a happy-go-lucky musical nomad, bemused at the extreme left turn my life had taken back in university when I’d discovered, much to everyone’s surprise (including my own), that I possessed a very fine singing voice and the volume to fill an opera house. Until that point, I’d been studying percussion at McGill University’s Music Faculty. The ironic thing? I’d been one of those many musicians who take great delight making fun of singers. We referred to those in the opera department as “mouth majors” and generally looked down on them as being “not quite musicians.” Then, almost too fast for even me to catch, I became one of them. Some of my former instrumental comrades still haven’t quite forgiven me.

  After university I travelled the world for several years, learning my new craft, first with my mentor, Gerhard Fosch, then in the school of operatic hard knocks as I became a voice for hire. Gradually, the roles I was offered got bigger, until one day a journalist referred to me as a “diva,” an overwrought term to be sure, but one that showed I’d finally scrabbled within sight of the summit of the operatic mountain.

  Two years ago my little world had been dragged off that mountain to the edge of life’s Grand Canyon and kicked hard in the derrière, leaving me to cling desperately to the edge by any means I could. Many times I came within one breath of giving up, letting go of the meagre hold I had, but something always held me back.

  You see, two years ago, my dear husband Marc, the light of my life, had tragically been burned to death when a fire tore through the house he was building for us near Lanark in eastern Ontario.

  It had been a long, painful road back, but with the help and support of my closest musical colleague, I’d made it.

  Feeling like I was ready to resume my life, I’d been hired out of the blue by the Opéra National de Paris as a very last-minute replacement for a soprano who’d precipitously decided to retire from the stage because of vocal problems everyone else knew she’d had for years. My manager and I were aware that the ONP was grabbing for anyone they could get at the last minute with even a modicum of star power. Their season opened in less than two weeks with a new production of Verdi’s most popular opera, Traviata, and the one thing I had going for me is that I am a very quick study. My percussionist’s mind for detail gave me that small edge.

  It was a delicate and poignant situation for me. The last time I’d trodden the boards had been that terrible night at the Met.

  I completely fell to pieces after Marc’s death, something that surprised me. Up until then, I’d always been dependable and capable Marta, the calm in the eye of any storm. But by the time my sister had dragged me off the plane at the Ottawa airport, I was medicated up to the eyeballs and barely functioning. Thank God for my much older siblings, who had immediately flown to my aid, my sister Narissa to New York to accompany me, and my brother Clark to Ottawa to smooth the way. I cannot say how grateful I was for their company on the long drive back to Perth, an hour west of the nation’s capital. In the following two days, they organized it all. I’d turned into a complete zombie, unable to do a thing. There was no funeral, because there was barely anything left of Marc’s body — the fire had been that hot. The only thing identifying him had been his partially-melted wedding band, the twin of the one I had on my finger. I refused to go out to the farm, so my brother handled all of that.

  A policeman eventually came and told me what had happened. It appeared Marc had knocked over a nearly full tank of propane, somehow breaking off the valve and safety fence on top. He’d been caught when the resulting jet of gas ignited. The constable had apologized for my loss and quickly left. Case closed.

  As the weeks dragged on, my depression had deepened, and I just could not pull myself out o
f it. By then I was back in my condo in Toronto. I didn’t go out. I stopped answering the phone. I barely ate, even though my favourite place to spend a morning shopping for food, the St. Lawrence Market, lay right across the street. I simply ceased to care about anything.

  Rightly or wrongly, I blamed myself for what had happened. You see, Marc had convinced me to let him build our dream house on my family’s old farm near Hopetown, a forty-minute drive north of Perth. When our parents had passed on, I’d bought out my siblings’ shares and had used it as my vacation home — until Marc came along.

  My friend and vocal coach, Lili Doubek, had come to my rescue a month after Marc’s passing, and not a moment too soon.

  It was late afternoon and I was still in my housecoat, staring listlessly down at Front Street, six storeys below, contemplating how much it might hurt to land headfirst on the sidewalk. My phone rang.

  It was Samatar, the building’s Somali concierge. “I am very sorry to bother you, Madame Hendriks, but there is someone down here who wishes to see you. I told her that you told me, ‘no visitors,’ but she refuses to leave. It is most inconvenient.”

  “Who is it?” I asked wearily.

  “It is that little woman from Czech land with the loud voice,” he answered in his inimitable way.

  Sighing heavily, I told him, “Put her on.”

  “Hello, Marta,” Lili said as I held the phone a good distance from my ear. I knew that bulldog tone very well. “Tell this man to let me through.”

  “But Lili, I’m not prepared for visitors. The apartment is —”

  “Nonsense! I have come all the way down here. I wish to see you.”

  Knowing she was stubborn enough to wait in the lobby until I gave in, I told Sam to let her get in the elevator. During the three minutes it took her to arrive at my door, I raced around the apartment, trying to pick up several weeks’ worth of garbage and dirty clothes, left wherever I’d dropped them.