Nightingale by Aleksandr Voinov Read Free Book Online Page A

escape back to the dressing room.
    He was light-headed with triumph, grinning like a fool, and still terrified, but only in retrospect. Thank God, he’d be rid of this fear for at least fifteen, sixteen hours. His mother had told him it would never really vanish, but yes, the big houses and big audiences made it much worse. How she’d managed to sing in the Paris Opéra was beyond him, a mystery of endurance.
    He was just closing the buttons of a fresh shirt when somebody knocked on the door. He lit a cigarette and opened. Von Starck.
    “Please do come in.” Yves waited for the man to step through, then measured him with a sweeping glance. “What, no roses?”
    Von Starck straightened. “I’m duly chastised. I was not aware you would want . . .”
    Yves felt sorry for him and placed a hand against the man’s chest. “I was joking.”
    Unease settled between them, and Yves could have kicked himself. He wasn’t good at flirting, certainly not with the staid German who could never quite tell levity from something meant in all seriousness.
    He was a great flirt onstage but mostly because he never had to pay up. The stage world was a different realm with different rules. He was the master up there, lord of a world made from the audience’s imagination. But the magic faltered once he’d stepped down and became plain old Yves.
    “Where would you like to go?”
    The driver took them back to the brasserie near the opera house, and after a quiet meal, Yves asked to go for a walk.
    The wide boulevard eventually led toward the Tuileries, but Yves swerved away from them and headed toward the Louvre, past the palatial museum, and to the bank of the Seine. He smoked in silence, aware of von Starck’s company and the driver who followed them just far enough to still make them out. He inhaled the smoke deeply, glad for every moment that old habit bought him.
    “You seem very thoughtful,” von Starck eventually offered.
    He could laugh it off, deny it all, say anything to throw the German off the scent. But that wouldn’t yield any results. He shrugged, hands buried in his coat pockets, wondering what they might look like to the few cyclists passing them on the way home just before curfew.
    He stopped and leaned his arms on the stone railing, glancing out to the river and, further away, Île de la Cité and the Pont Neuf. He didn’t know how to voice the words that had to be spoken. He didn’t even have a song for this. Von Starck drew closer, gazing into the distance, and then rested his arm across Yves’s shoulders.
    “I don’t like seeing you sad,” the German said in that low, soft voice of his, the corner of his mouth pulling up in a wistful smile. The weight across Yves’s shoulders was reassuring, paternal, protective, and he found himself leaning into the touch. Maybe he didn’t actually have to say anything.
    “I’m not sad.” Yves looked at the man’s face.
    Von Starck turned to meet Yves’s gaze fully. The arm on Yves’s shoulders shifted, slid down a bit, a comforting pressure in the middle of his back. “Then maybe share your thoughts with me.”
    “You’d think me . . . abnormal. Decadent.”
    Von Starck now smiled. “I doubt that very much.”
    Understanding, acceptance, attraction, all so clearly laid out in the officer’s face. Liking him was easy enough, even in that infernal uniform of his. Yves glanced around, but there were no witnesses, all lights were dimmed. He took von Starck’s free hand and pressed it with both of his. “There just seems to be no privacy in this city.”
    Von Starck nodded and let his arm slide down further. “What do you suggest?”
    “My flat. The building has no concierge.”
    Von Starck nodded again. “If that will not create complications for you.”
    “I’m discreet. I don’t . . .” He’d never brought a man home. There had been nobody really but Maurice, and Maurice had the clubs and the villa, which provided a lot of protection. He’d been