"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 5 - Die Upon A Kiss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

rather than seeing the flopping, wrenching suggestion of struggle, the thud of bodies on the brick walls,
and the grunt of impact.
Then he smelled blood.
He grabbed the nearest form-coarse wool and greasy hair slithered under his fingers heaved the man off
his feet, and flung him toward Camp Street. Indistinct forms writhed in the murk; a man shrieked in pain.
He grabbed again; slipped in the muck of horse-shit and rainwater. Edged metal bit his arm. He seized
the attacker's hand and twisted it; a moment later, arms hooked around his body from behind.
He dropped his weight, turned, grabbed the front of a rough shirt, hauled his assailant into a punch like
the driving-rod of a steamboat's engine. More blood-smell and the crash of a body against the wall.
Someone opened the gate at the end of the alley, said, "Holy Jesus!" and slammed it again, and voices
hollered confusedly on the other side of the wall. The same instant light speared from the stage door and
Madame Scie called, "Who's there?" Almost under January's feet, Lorenzo Belaggio screamed,
"Murder!" again.
Someone blundered into January, throwing him against the wall. Footsteps pounded and he saw two
forms-he thought there were two-stagger against the smudgy glow of the street. A startled horse
whinnied; a man cursed in English, cracked a whip.
"I'm killed!" howled Belaggio. "Dio mio, I am dying!" January knelt in the filth at his side.
"Hideputa!" In the jerking flare of two whale-oil lamps the darkest-voiced of the Opera company's three
sopranos, Consuela Montero, strode up the alley a step behind Madame Scie, velvet skirts hitched high
above plump knees.
"Is he all right?"
"Oh, I am dying!"
"Scarf," said January tersely. "Ruffle, kerchief, anything you've got."
Madame Scie thrust the lamp at her companion, flipped up her schoolgirlish gauze dancer's skirt to get at
a petticoat-ruffle. Yellow light glistened on blood. Most of it seemed, in fact, to be coming from
Belaggio's left arm rather than his torso, but January jerked the black longtailed coat back from the
impresario's bulky shoulders, searching for telltale spreading red on the white of his shirt, the
azure-stitched gold of his waistcoat. Before the ballet mistress could rip free her ruffle, a male voice said,
"Here," and a mauve silk handkerchief was passed down over January's shoulder by a man's hand in a
mauve kidskin glove. "Did you see who did it?"
January glanced around and dimly recognized one of the gentlemen who'd come to watch the rehearsal.
Handsome as Apollo, French Creole by his speech, wealthy by the cut of the mauve velvet coat. Even
the buttons on its sleeve, and on the glove, were amethyst, flashing in the lantern-light as he stretched a
hand down to Belaggio. "Are you well, Monsieur?"
"Lorenzo!" shrieked Drusilla d'Isola, the prima donna, and fainted in the Creole gentleman's arms.
"Get him inside." January's own arm ached damnably from the knife-slash he'd taken and he still couldn't
find any wound on Belaggio other than the cut on his arm, which he bound up with petticoat-ruffle and
purple silk. He got a glimpse of a bloody skinning-knife lying in the mud, but lost sight of it as Madame
Scie stepped back to make way for first violinist Hannibal Sefton-hired, like January, for the Italian
opera's first season at the American Theater-and Silvio Cavallo, tenor.
The sight of young Cavallo seemed to miraculously revive the swooning impresario. "Assassin!" Belaggio
cried, jabbing his forefinger at the tenor, then sagging dramatically back against January's injured arm like
a dying steer. "Murderer! Conspirator! Carbonaro!"
Cavallo, who'd stepped forward to help support him-Belaggio was nearly January's height and anything
but slender-fell back, dark eyes flashing, and Hannibal said reasonably, "Not conspirator, surely?
Conspire with whom?"
As if to answer the question, Cavallo's friend from the chorus, a dark, squat Hercules named Bruno
Ponte, appeared panting from the darkness.
"They have conspired to murder me ... !"
Belaggio was definitely not wounded anywhere but in the arm. "Begging your pardon, Signor," January