A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

-------------------------------------------------------

II. A game of chess
(or, A Devil put aside for me)

"Mamma said you can only use the music room when she's not around. She hates listening to bad music. You can't play anything else."

Small girl, the perfect incarnation of the don, only sharper, the little princess of the Camorra¿. Gokudera doesn't remember much of his half-sister until after the accident, until after everything that was once familiar to him had suddenly become too large, too alien, too unpredictable. They had replaced his fratello maggiore immediately after the incident, and he was dragged to Sunday mass at a different time, apart from the rest of the family.

Now this little dark-haired, quick-tongued stranger had materialised in the place of his mother, to tell him what he could and could not do, where he could and could not enter. The mansion––where before he ran heedlessly through the hallways without a care––was now dotted with invisible demarcations and split into marked territories. She always seemed to be the one telling him off, however, and he rarely saw the woman he was taught to call "Mamma" (he never did).

But he would not have his half-sister take the music room. Bianchi moved wherever she liked and as she pleased, while he inched his way around the house, but this room––and the piano, her piano, now his––could not, should not be touched by anyone else.

Gokudera glared at her rebelliously, fingers crooked, arming himself.

Bianchi crossed her arms. "Well, she's here now," she quipped, which meant You have no place here, this has become my territory.

He released a sharp volley of allegretto notes in retaliation. This room belongs to the one who can use it.

He had since learned what the terrible gleam in his sister's eye, the twitch of her cheek and the slight downturn of her lip meant. Bianchi was the perfect child-self of the Camorristi's bigger bosses. She was quick to understand the langauge of their way of life, and the delicate politics that existed between "family". She had their father's discreet cruelty. She stared at his defiance, livid but silent, and he in his ignorance took it for defeat.

"You can't play anything else," she said, trembling, but he didn't hear her, banging away on the lower octaves, burying whatever she would have said to him––a warning, now that he thought back to it––in a steady stream of sound.

He did have fair warning, in the form of all the small animals that seemed to turn up in places where he would find them. All of them were either inside, or in paths leading to the music room. The family cat, he had thought, knowing the inexplainable feline trait of killing smaller game and, without further damaging the carcass, presenting it to the acknowledged master.

It wasn't to different from how lower gang members showed the profits of controlled areas to the Don, and the Don in turn tendered the results to the other Camorristi bosses in the quarterly conclave. On the one hand it deferred to the master that this is what I do for you. On the other hand it is also proof of what the lower man could do, when territories were breached.

He wrinkled his nose and had the butler remove them, or toed them aside when they got in the way. They all smelled strange though, sweet like the milk he took for breakfast, like nuts¡. His room smelled the same too, his towel, the biscuits in the piano room. And while it wasn't as cloying or as vexing as the scent of a corpse, it annoyed him. It bothered him; much as it was most probably the cat (as she had done it before) there was something else he had missed. If his sister inherited their father's cunning streak, he had the don's penchant for sharp observation.

"Is he alive? Is he alive or not? Don't just stand there, get my kit! The poison kit on the dresser in my room!"

Shamal bending over him, beyond a haze of white, as if some blanket or shroud were pulled over his face, and he was looking through the strained fabric at what was beyond. The breakfast table in utter chaos; the maids weeping in the corner, the other fratelli yelling and waving their guns, while other members from elsewhere in the house rushed in and yelled even louder, tried to put order to things. Shamal's face was overhead now, but even the doctor's distinctive scent was dulled entirely. The uproar was a muffled 'jug-jug'¬ in his ears.

"His eyes are turning milky. It's a mild seizure, someone give me a spoon so he doesn't bite his tongue!"

Hard metal slipped in between his teeth, making a loud clanking sound in his head. Shamal pressing a breathing device to his face, oxygen being pumped in from somewhere, invading his lungs, pulling them up and pressing them down again in a violent act of respiration. Something dribbled from the side of his face, but all he could focus on was the world beyond the shroud.

"Milk! It was in the milk. Throw out the every gallon you find in the kitchen! You. Boy. Breathe. That's right, you can hear me. Breathe deeply."

What is that noise. What is that wind blowing through.

He turned his head feebly in his milky world, his head drooping like a heavy, heavy note. There was only one other person in the dining room that wasn't either red in the face and threatening murder to every named gang in Naples, or running about calling out the saints' mercy. Bianchi sat making slow work on her morning croissant, observing everything with the satisfaction of a commander who had won a war.

Her narrowed eyes watched him malevolently, dark in her almond-shaped face.

Notes for "A Game of Chess" :

➊ Camorra » are essentially a unified group of mafia families in the Campania region, with a base in Naples. Within the Camorra are family heads, or bosses, one of which is Gokudera's father. They have ties to the powerful Cosa Nostra syndicates in southern Italy. It was for their existence, as well as for the fact that Naples is the centre for music (59) and the best pizzas and coffee in Italy (Bianchi's beginnings).

➋ Nuts » traces of cyanide leave a smell of crushed almonds. Almonds soaked in milk is also a favourite addition to morning muesli/ oatmeal grains. Prolonged exposure can lead to stiffening of joints (which may explain 59's eventual quitting of his piano playing. A huge dosage directly taken (i.e., Hitler and Msr. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, also a chess player) can cause seizure and the like, and can be fatal.

➌ Jug jug » from "and the world pursues...Jug jug to dirty ears'. Scattered references also to the conversation in "The Wasteland."