‘Where else do you expect me to be?’
‘Milan. You have to sing tonight.’
‘That’s why they have understudies, Brett,’ Flavia said dismissively. ‘To sing when the principal singers get sick.’
‘But you aren’t sick,’ Brett said, made dull by pain and drugs.
‘Don’t let the general manager of La Scala hear you say that, or I’ll make you pay the fine for me.’ It was difficult for Flavia to keep her voice light, but she tried.
‘But you never cancel.’
‘Well, I did, and that’s the end of it. You Anglo-Saxons are so serious about work,’ Flavia said, voice now artificially light. ‘Do you want some more water?’
Brett nodded and immediately regretted the motion. She lay still for a few moments and closed her eyes, waiting for the wave of nausea and dizziness to pass. When she opened her eyes, she saw Flavia leaning over her with the cup. Again, she tasted the blessed coolness, closed her eyes, and drifted away for a while. Suddenly, she asked, ‘What happened?’
Alarmed, Flavia asked, ‘Don’t you remember?’
Brett closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Yes, I remember. I was afraid they’d kill you.’ Her head rang with the dull resonance created by her wired teeth.
Flavia laughed at this, consistent in her bravado. ‘No chance of that. It must have been all those Toscas I’ve sung. I just went at them with the knife, and I got one of them, right across the arm.’ She waved her arm in the air in front of her, repeating the gesture and smiling at the memory, Brett was sure, of the knife cutting into him. ‘I wish I’d killed him,’ Flavia said in an absolutely conversational voice, and Brett believed her.
‘Then what?’
‘They ran. Then I went downstairs and got Luca, and he went for the doctor, and we brought you here.’ As Flavia watched, Brett’s eyes drifted closed, and she slept for a few minutes, lips open, steel wires grotesquely visible.
Suddenly, her eye snapped open and she looked around the room as if surprised to find herself there. She saw Flavia and grew calm.
‘Why did they do it?’ Flavia asked, voicing the question that had been with her for two days.
A long time passed before Brett answered. ‘Semenzato.’
‘At the museum?’
‘Yes.’
‘What? What did they say?’
‘I don’t understand.’ If she had been capable of shaking her head without pain, Brett would have done it. ‘Makes no sense.’ Her voice was garbled by the heavy trap that held her teeth together. She said Semenzato’s name again and closed her eyes for a long time. When she opened them, she asked, ‘What’s wrong with me?’
Flavia was ready for this question and answered it briefly. ‘Two ribs are broken. And your jaw is cracked.’
‘What else?’
‘That’s the worst. Your back is badly scraped.’ She saw Brett’s confusion and explained. ‘You fell against the wall and dragged your back down the bricks when you fell. And your face is very, very blue,’ Flavia concluded, trying to make light of it. ‘The contrast makes your eyes stand out, but I don’t think I like the total effect.’
‘How bad is it?’ Brett asked, not liking the joking tone.
‘Oh, not so bad,’ Flavia said, obviously lying. Brett gave a long one-eyed look that forced Flavia to amend things. ‘You have to keep the ribs bandaged, and you’ll be very stiff for a week or so. He said there’ll be no permanent damage.’ Because it was the only good news she had, she completed the doctor’s report. ‘They’ll take the wires out in a few days. It’s just a hairline crack. And your teeth are all right.’ When she saw how little encouragement Brett took from this, she added, ‘And your nose.’ Still no smile. ‘There won’t be any scars on your face: once the swelling goes away, you’ll be fine.’ Flavia said nothing about the scars that would remain on Brett’s back, nor did she say anything about how long it would take for the swelling and bruising to disappear from her face.
Suddenly Brett realized how tired this brief conversation had made her, and she felt new waves of sleep pulling at her body. ‘Go home for a while, Flavia. I’ll sleep and then . . .’ Her voice trailed away before she could finish, and she was asleep. Flavia pushed herself back into her chair and studied the damaged face that lay sideways on the bed in front of her. The bruises that spread across the forehead and the cheeks had gone almost black during the last day and a half, and one eye was still swollen shut. Brett’s lower lip was swollen up and around the vertical split that left it gaping wide.
Flavia had been forcibly kept out of the emergency room while the doctors worked on Brett, cleaning her back and taping her ribs. Nor had she been there to watch them thread the thin wires between her teeth, binding her jaws together. She had been left to pace the long corridors of the hospital, joining her fear with that of the other visitors and patients who walked, crowded into the bar, caught what little light filtered into the open courtyard. She had paced for an hour, begging three cigarettes from different people, the first she had smoked in more than ten years.
Since late Sunday afternoon, she had been at the side of Brett’s bed, waiting for her to wake up, and had gone back to the apartment just once, the day before, and then only to shower and make a few phone calls, inventing the phantom illness that was to keep her from singing at La Scala that evening. Her nerves were pulled tight by too little sleep, too much coffee, the renewed craving for a cigarette, and the oily slick of fear that clings to the skin of all those who spend too long a time inside a hospital.
She looked across at her lover and wished again that she had killed the man who did this. Flavia Petrelli had no comprehension of regret, but there was very little she didn’t understand about revenge.
* * * *
