The True Adventures of Nicolo Zen (15 page)

Pulling her close, I felt a tingling down my spine, and a warmth and well-being that seemed to suffuse every inch of me. I wanted to hold on to this moment as long as I could. I thought of the beautiful Venetian ladies I had seen on the quays as a boy—how remote, and untouchable, they seemed. But now, lost in our kisses and caresses, I couldn’t imagine any of them being as beautiful as Madeleine.

Gradually my thoughts took a darker turn. The fact that Madeleine had marveled at my musical talents began to gnaw at me. I enjoyed being praised by professional musicians, and however alien it had been to me not so many months earlier, I had grown accustomed to receiving adulation from strangers; but after the short, delicious time we had spent together, Madeleine was no longer a stranger in my mind. As the very first girl I ever kissed, she never would be. But her praise reawakened the grave misgivings I’d had about fooling my friends at the Ospedale—about being an impostor. I was hungry then, just off the streets, and didn’t have the luxury of following my conscience rather than my stomach. In Vienna I was anything but hungry, and my conscience was tugging at me. Increasingly there were moments onstage when I could not rationalize how I had become so proficient on the clarinet. I told myself that it was my fingerwork, my breath, that
brought the notes into the world, willing them into existence, but only after I had clearly, concretely imagined the sound. This took real skill and intuition, even on an enchanted instrument. Could I have played the way I did without Massimo’s assistance? Not likely, but no longer impossible, I reassured myself, thanks to the arduous regimen I maintained, practicing for hundreds of hours and performing constantly. However, in order to retain my self-respect, I knew I had to test this proposition one day soon, taking the stage with another clarinet in hand, for example.

But that day had not yet come, I thought, as Madeleine sighed and laid her head on my shoulder. I was enjoying my taste of the good life and I didn’t want anything to jeopardize it for a while.

We had just heard a coach pull up on the street below, and the sound of a woman’s laughter, so we knew we only had a few more minutes together.

“It’s Noémi,” Madeleine said simply, smoothing out her dress and standing up. “You had better go.”

“Will I see you—?”

“Tomorrow, I hope. Will you join us for breakfast?”

“I would love to.”

“Come at eleven o’clock.” She smiled and kissed me once more, on the forehead. “Noémi likes to sleep late.”

I didn’t know how I could make the hours fly by fast enough, but I would try, I thought, as the Marquise breezed into the apartment moments before the maid showed me out.

“Herr Zen,” the Marquise exclaimed cheerfully. “I hope Madeleine was a good hostess.”

“Very good,” I said. “Good night, Marquise.”

“Please, call me Noémi. And may I call you Nicolò?”

“Of course.” I made an awkward bow and headed for the stairs.

“He is adorable, Madeleine,” I heard the Marquise say as the door closed behind her.

In my haste, I nearly bumped into a tall, uniformed man at the foot of the stairs. It was one of the officers who had joined the Marquise at the reception at the Aldenfer Hotel.

He was annoyed, but as soon as he recognized me, he tipped his hat and said, “Excellent concert, young man. Welcome to Vienna.”

I awoke at dawn, bathed and dressed, and when Gertrude arrived, told her I would not require breakfast. Accustomed to preparing me hearty meals in the morning, she must have been surprised by this information, as well as the fact that, formally dressed, I was vigorously polishing my best black boots. But she asked no questions.

At eleven o’clock sharp, I arrived at the Marquise’s apartment. A different maid let me in, and while there was as yet no sign of the Marquise or Madeleine, a table in the parlor was laid out with a pot of steaming coffee, hot cinnamon rolls, raspberry crêpes, and a bowl of oranges.

The Marquise came into the room in a yellow silk robe. Her hair was perfectly combed, but she wore no makeup, and looked as if she had just emerged from sleep.

“Come, have an orange, Nicolò,” she said by way of greeting. “They were a gift from Baron Stösser. He brought orange and lemon trees all the way from Sardinia, and he grows the fruit in his orangerie. His son Konrad brought them over for Madeleine and me.”

At that moment, I was amazed to discover that, in addition to the pleasure I had derived from embracing and kissing Madeleine, and savoring her company, I had apparently, within hours, acquired an entirely new set of feelings that included jealousy.

Though for all I knew Madeleine and the baron’s son were passing acquaintances, the mere mention of him as a fellow visitor got my imagination working, and I felt a pang in my chest. Until the previous night, I had never kissed or touched a girl as I had Madeleine, and suddenly I was brooding over whether I had rivals for her affection. In a matter of hours, my hubris had expanded far beyond the concert stage.

As the maid poured me coffee, Madeleine appeared, also in a silk robe, with red slippers to match, and flashed me a smile. She looked even more beautiful in the daylight. “I am so happy to see you,” she said as I stood up to pull out her chair. I was grateful for Herr Hoyer’s lessons in etiquette, which were already paying dividends.

Throughout breakfast, I could barely take my eyes off Madeleine, but the Marquise was far more engrossed by the series of notes delivered by the footman and handed to her by the maid than by the two of us, much less the rolls and crêpes.

Afterward, Madeleine saw me to the door, squeezed my hand, and kissed me on the lips.

“Come back tonight,” she whispered, “when Noémi is out.”

And I did.

What made my liaison with Madeleine all the sweeter was that she behaved as if she couldn’t get enough of me. Perhaps it was the novelty of my origins (I told her how I had been orphaned and made my way, omitting my stint at the Ospedale, of course); or the possibility that her passion for my musicianship (she attended all my performances) had spilled over into a physical attraction; or, best of all, that she simply found me irresistible. After two weeks in which I had visited her every night, I became so cocky and indiscreet—dressing to the nines and putting on cologne when I went out—that Gertrude felt compelled to step out of character long enough to give me a gentle warning.

“Do be careful, Herr Zen,” she said, helping me on with my jacket. “You’re a fine young gentleman, but remember: for anyone who becomes so famous so fast, the snares of the city are especially treacherous.”

I thanked her for what I heard as a compliment, but was deaf to her advice. It was impossible for me to think of Madeleine as someone to avoid—not when I longed to be with her more—even when I reminded myself of the obvious: she was perhaps an even more temporary resident of Vienna—as she had hinted to me several times—utterly dependent on her unreliable sister, a married woman on the run from her husband.

It took the unexpected appearance of that husband to bring
this home to me. He arrived in Vienna on the afternoon of August 25, the very day I would make a discovery that not only altered my relationship with Madeleine and diverted my musical career, but made me flee Vienna.

It was a summer day so hot that clouds of steam were rising from the many fountains along the Klappersteinstrasse. I had left the Marquise’s apartment at noon after another leisurely breakfast with Madeleine, picked up some money at Hoyer’s office, and was walking carefree toward the river, where I knew I would find a cool breeze. When I stopped beneath a shade tree to eat a chocolate given me by the Marquise’s maid, Margot (who by that time had become complicitous in my nocturnal visits), I spotted a colorful poster on a nearby wall that stopped me cold:

I had learned enough German to know that
Grandios
meant “Magnificent.” And that
Maximus
was the German for
Massimo
. My heart skipped a beat: was Massimo performing in Vienna? And, if so, why hadn’t I heard about it before? I hurried to the Toffenklaus Theater, just a few blocks away, where I found another poster at the main entrance that baffled me even more. The conjurer depicted on the poster was not Massimo. He had close-cropped blond hair, a blond mustache, blue eyes, pointier ears than Massimo, and a squarer, Germanic jaw. On his palm he
balanced a miniature man in full evening dress. The man looked bewildered, as well he should, for this was supposedly one of Maximus Grandios’s signature feats: taking a volunteer from the audience and shrinking him to the size of a mouse.

I bought a ticket for that evening’s show and went directly home, where I found Gertrude preparing my lunch.

“Tell me, Gertrude, what do you know about a conjurer named Maximus Grandios?”

She answered almost exactly as Signor Agnetti’s landlady had when I asked about Massimo the Magnificent. “Everyone in Vienna has heard of Maximus Grandios,” she said. “The greatest magician in all of Austria.”

“He lives here, in Vienna?”

“Of course.”

“For how long?”

She looked puzzled. “As long as I can remember.”

“Have you ever seen him perform?”

“Once. With my sister. But we left early.”

“Why?”

“My sister grew frightened. She said his tricks did not seem like tricks. And that all magic is black magic.” Gertrude paused. “She is very religious.”

“But what frightened her?”

“When he made a man disappear—a silversmith—she was sure the man had really disappeared.” She averted her eyes. “I thought it was a trick.”

“Yet you haven’t gone to see Maximus again.”

“No.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “I had a friend who knew that silversmith. About two weeks after Maximus’s
performance, I met her on the street and she told me the silversmith had disappeared that same night. No one had seen or heard from him. People said he had run off with a woman, or was in trouble with the police.”

“Were the police called in?”

“The chief of police was at the theater. He is a friend of Maximus’s. He assumed the silversmith had fled the city for personal reasons.”

“What was the trick Maximus performed?”

“The silversmith went onstage and Maximus’s assistant gave him a pair of shoes to put on.”

“What kind of shoes?”

“Ordinary-looking shoes. They may have been green—or blue. The silversmith put them on and stepped inside a circle of candles the assistant lit. From the shadows, Maximus asked the silversmith where he would most like to be if he could be anywhere else in the world. The silversmith thought about it, and replied, ‘India.’ Maximus closed his eyes, clapped his hands, and the silversmith was gone without a trace. Like everyone else, I thought our eyes had deceived us and that he would reappear at any moment. When his seat remained empty, I figured he must be backstage. That’s when my sister grew agitated. And she wasn’t surprised two weeks later when I told her the silversmith hadn’t been seen at his shop or his house. ‘If he returned by sea,’ she said, ‘it would take him longer than that.’ ”

“And did he return?” I asked.

Gertrude shook her head. “No, Herr Zen. And I heard that Maximus has never performed the trick again—not in Vienna, anyway.”

I was in an aisle seat in the second row when Maximus Grandios came onstage and bowed. He was dressed in white from head to toe. He was as tall and formidable as Massimo Magnifico, with a similar aura of confidence and power. At first glance, he didn’t much resemble Massimo, but there were certain elements—sharply angled left eyebrow, thin upper lip, broad uncreased forehead—that, when looked at discretely, reminded me of Massimo. In fact, if I reassembled Maximus’s face in my mind using only those elements and leaving the rest blank, I might imagine I was looking at Massimo. Because of that, and his name, of course, and his monochromatic costume, I knew I had to meet Maximus Grandios face to face.

The crowd was enthusiastic, buzzing in anticipation, leaping to their feet as one to applaud Maximus’s entrance. It was clear that many of them had been drawn to the theater for something more than light entertainment. There was an edginess, a sense of danger, arising from the mere fact of their having entered Maximus’s domain, where any one of them could meet the fate of the silversmith.

Maximus’s props consisted of three curtained booths, a gold pyramid with a triangular door, and a cauldron dancing with flames. The backdrop was a scarlet curtain on which gold and silver birds were embroidered—except that they were moving,
flitting from point to point, sometimes flying off to circle beneath the theater’s domed ceiling before returning to the fabric of the curtain. All through Maximus’s act, those birds were in motion, yet so intense was his presence, and so startling his conjurations, that they barely distracted me.