Die Upon a Kiss Read Online Free PDF Page A

office had been quenched. The backstage was dark, and cold.
    “Belaggio . . . ?”
    “Gone back to the City Hotel with a couple Guards to make sure he gets there all in one piece. The ladies, too, all of ’em.” Shaw slouched his hands in his pockets, spit toward the sandbox in the corner, and missed it by a yard—a tall, stringy, shaggy-haired bumpkin who looked like he should have been harvesting pumpkins somewhere in Illinois, until you saw his eyes. “You want me to help you all the way back to your rooms, or are you satisfied Mr. Cavallo here won’t try to assassinate you on the way just to keep you quiet?”
    Cavallo looked genuinely alarmed at this jest, as well he might—in Milan under the rule of the Austrians it was no joking matter. January said quickly, “Of course not. That’s absurd. The men who attacked Belaggio were Americans, I’ll swear to it.”
    “You seen ’em? Heard their voices?”
    January hesitated. “I heard one of them whisper ‘nigger,’ ” he said at last. “And I smelled them. Smelled their clothes.”
    Shaw nodded, noting this piece of evidence behind those gray, lashless eyes that, for all their seeming mildness, were cold as glass.
    “They dropped a skinning-knife in the alley.” January staggered a little getting to his feet, and his arm ached hideously under Hannibal’s makeshift bandage. Someone had fetched his music-satchel and hat from the front of the theater. With another wary glance at Shaw, Cavallo put an arm under January’s good shoulder: the young man was almost as tall as he, clear-browed and hawk-featured, and wearing, as Hannibal had pointed out, a short tweed roundabout instead of the nip-waisted blue cutaway he’d had on when first January saw him in the alley.
    “Did they, now?” Shaw wriggled a candle free of the mess of wax on the table around it, picked away a straggle of charred wick, and lit it from the lantern, to precede them down the stairs. Ponte came around to January’s other side and carefully supported him without touching his injured arm. He, too, watched Shaw, not with Silvio Cavallo’s ingrained wariness, but with deeper and more virulent hate. In any of the many dialects of the Italian peninsula,
sbirro—
policeman—was the foulest of insults, and with good reason. Hannibal followed, holding the lantern high.
    Very softly, as they descended the plank steps to the prop-vault, January heard Ponte whisper a question in Sicilian—“. . . guesses,” January made out the word.
    Cavallo answered immediately
“Silencio,”
and nodded back at Hannibal. And to January, in the standard Italian in which the various Neapolitans, Milanese, and Lombards communicated with one another and outsiders, “Where is it that the Signor lives?”
    “Rue des Ursulines,” replied January. “At the back of the French town. Hannibal can guide you. It’s about a mile. I’m sorry we can’t take a cab, but for men of my race in this city, it is forbidden by law.” His knees felt weak, and by the time they reached the end of the alley he was glad of the support.
    At this hour of the morning even the final revelers of Carnival had at last gone home to bed. The brass band that had been playing in the Promenade Hotel behind the theater had fallen silent. Even in the Fatted Calf Tavern, just up the street, the lights were out, and in the gambling rooms of the City Hotel. The distant clamor of the levee, audible from the street before the theater at most hours, was stilled, although in less than an hour the markets would begin to stir. The thick air smelled of the river, of mist and the livestock markets close by at the foot of Lafayette Street.
    The city slept.
    Gorged and drunk and sated. Dreaming its dreams of wealth and fever, sugar and cotton and slaves, beside the slow, thick river. Slaves and French and Americans and the free colored
sang mêlés
united for a few hours in their human need for rest.
    Glancing behind him, January saw Lieutenant Shaw