Waiters arrived with our courses, soup and fish and beef for me, with a curious variety of non-kosher sea creatures for Holmes. The restaurant began to fill, with voices in several languages setting the chandeliers a-quivering. The table closest to ours held our generational opposite: a dowager with a young man whom I did not think was a grandson or indeed any kind of blood relation, although he was most attendant to her needs and rewarded all her quips with a hearty laugh. Beyond them a quartet of Germans prodded suspiciously at their plates. The table on our other side was more interesting, two bronzed young Englishmen and a woman of perhaps sixty, whose beads-and-feathers costume suggested she was heading for one of those Carnevale parties. She spoke little, but lit up a series of thin, dark cigarettes at each break between courses. I bent my head to listen to them, curious as to her nationality, and caught the word Fenice.
“That trio is talking about La Fenice,” I told Holmes. “You should go to the opera, while we’re here.”
“Is Lady Vivian a devotée of opera?”
“Not that I know of. But you are. Feel free to go, if you like.”
“Thank you,” he said, a trace sardonically. He knew me well enough not to suggest two tickets.
The taller, darker-haired, and marginally less sun-burnt of the young men was also the drunker. His voice continued to rise as our courses came and went. Just before the maître d’ went over to invite him to lower his voice, he was embarked on a raucous and somewhat raunchy tale of a woman who held a party out on the Lido that involved a melonseed-spitting contest between a renowned pansy (his word) and the city’s chief Fascist.
“ ‘We’ll settle the question of which tongue is stronger, or my name isn’t Elsa Maxwell.’ ’Cept the way she said it, the Fascist didn’t even see that she was being rude about him and clever about the pansy-boy, d’you see? You know, like, the boy’s tongue—”
Fortunately or otherwise, the maître d’ swept up to the table and hushed the diner’s suggestive remarks.
However, my mind was neither outraged nor amused. Instead, it had snagged on the woman he had mentioned.
“I swear I know that name,” I said to Holmes—but from where? Long ago, far away…ah. “My mother! She used to know a Mrs Maxwell who had a daughter named Elsa, back in San Francisco. They worked together on some money-raising projects in the early days of the War, Mrs Maxwell being one of the few people who believed the War would last long enough for America to get involved. Although she may have simply been playing up to my mother. At any rate, her daughter was, shall we say, larger than life? Too large for the society of the Bay Area, at any rate. That story about the melonseed-spitting sounds precisely the sort of prank that Elsa Maxwell would have pulled.”
Had I actually met the woman? My sense of her was oddly incomplete. Which suggested that either I had encountered her just before my brain was rattled by the accident that took my family, or that she was one of those people so distinctive in the words of others, one begins to think one has actually met them.
I suspected that we had in fact never come face to face. Still, my impression of her was vivid. Perhaps because at fourteen, one’s sensitivity to unspoken judgments and the secret knowledge of adults is at a peak, and everything that was said about Elsa seemed to resonate with double meaning.
Looking back, I thought I could guess why.
“Holmes,” I said, keeping my voice down, “I may go over to the Lido tomorrow.”
“Good heavens. The play-ground of the rich and infamous? Why would you wish to go there?”
“Because among other things, if it is the same Elsa Maxwell, gossip had her as a lesbian.”
“Are you suggesting there is some sort of a…a guild?”
“Of course not. But there may be a community of the like-minded.”
Before we could go further with the thought, the drunken young man’s voice rose up again. Holmes dropped his table napkin beside his glass. “Shall we take some fresh air?”
This time of night, and particularly on a Sunday, the majority of strolling was done up in the Piazza San Marco, with any pedestrian traffic here either on its way back from the public gardens, or on its way home to the working quarters near the Arsenale. The evening air was soft, with the largest noise a gentle tap of waves against stones and wooden boat-hulls. Light danced off the water. I tucked my arm through his and we strolled, paces matching, along the flat waterfront in the direction of the gardens.
It happened in an instant.
One moment the evening was quiet and warm and touched by the magic that inhabits all islands. The next moment, a slim figure hurrying out from a narrow passage walked straight into a pair of men headed in our direction.
All three staggered back, but none of them fell. I anticipated laughter—if they happened to be acquaintances—or else a rapid exchange of furious Venetian ending with growls and grumbles as all went back to their former paths.
What I did not expect was to have the man who had been walked into, a dark shadow of a figure, take a step forward and smash his fist into the slim man’s face. The offender bounced hard off the wall and collapsed to the pavement—only to have his attacker step forward to kick him, then again. The sound was terrible, even fifty feet away, low thuds followed by mewls of pain. I started to move, but Holmes grabbed my arm.
“Holmes! That man—”
“Wait.” Something about the urgency of the word stopped the protest on my lips. My eyes sought out the figures again, fearing further attack—but instead, the two dark figures stepped around the man on the ground and disappeared into the alleyway from which the victim had so precipitously dashed.
The grip on my arm loosed, and I hurried forward.
The man was already on his feet, head down and shoulder propped against the wall. Blood poured from his nose, but he ignored me completely until I had summoned enough Italian to ask if he was hurt. He shook his head, though that had to be untrue. But when he turned aside before the contents of his stomach surged forth, and he did so without crying out in pain, we were reassured that no major damage had been done.
He remained standing—supported, but upright. Then at my use of the word polizia, he gave me a sickly smile and shook his head again, making an effort to step away from the wall. After a moment, he shambled away. We watched him go.
“He was lucky, Holmes.”
“Yes.”
“But we should tell the police.”
“Those were the police.”
I gaped at him. “What? Those…thugs?”
“Did you not notice, there was no gleam of white shirt beneath their jackets?”
“Blackshirts?”
“Yes.”
The dark alleyway seemed to crawl with threat and the sour stench of vomit.
“I believe I’ve had enough fresh air for tonight, Holmes.”
Chapter Twenty-two
BETWEEN THE HEAT AND THE disquiet, neither of us slept as firmly as I might have hoped. We were on our balcony at dawn, watching the city creep into existence.
Shapes emerged from the darkness, shy, deceptive. Across the San Marco Basin, the pale front of Palladio’s San Giorgio took on substance: a domed outline, the tower. Off to my left grew the hump and jumble of trees in the public gardens, their organic shapes foreign in a city where soft referred to marble and lead. The pale curve of the Riva degli Schiavoni described the water’s edge before its route veered towards the Arsenale, that centuries-old ship-yard that had been the base of Venice’s immense power. Venice was full of that kind of invisible pull, with patterns and shapes that only a knowledge of history would explain—and even then, mere explanation was rarely sufficient.
It was a city with a feminine face over masculine muscles. Where larch pillars sunk in mud held up palaces of Istrian stone—stone that itself was a product of the sea. A place where one’s main floor was ab
ove the ground, where a thousand years of work could be wiped out by a wave, where a city ruler could be felled by an anonymous note or a labourer’s family sleep beneath a Tiepolo fresco.
Venice begged for metaphor, and at the same time, defied any attempt at reducing it to words, notes, or pigment. For centuries, Venice had fascinated artists of the ineffable, keeping Tintoretto and Titian and Veronese busy with one attempt after another at capturing the essence beneath its surface beauty. The city was a poem one never truly understood, a piece of art that kept pulling the eye. This must be what music was to Holmes: a surface texture that suggested a deeper meaning.
The island across from me shimmered beneath the growing dawn. I could now see masts from the marina at San Giorgio’s base. Closer in, a gondolier plied his way towards the Grand Canal, and I became aware of his voice, greeting the rising sun with song: “O sole mio…”
And with cliché, the magic shattered and I laughed aloud.
Chapter Twenty-three
RUSSELL’S EAGER RUSH TO DEFEND a casual victim the previous night had troubled Holmes, and rode his mind as he sat on the hotel balcony waiting for the kitchen to awake and produce tea. It was still dark, but at least the majority of mosquitoes had retreated to their niches, leaving a stray few to be repelled by pipe smoke.
Holmes was realist enough to recognise that he himself had not perhaps given Mycroft’s warnings sufficient weight. But why would he? Mycroft’s own government supported Mussolini. The Chancellor of the Exchequer openly praised Il Duce’s strength—although one should not overlook Churchill’s history of party-changing and self-aggrandisement.
Keep your head down, Mycroft had urged. Perhaps now Russell might beware of the dangers.
The city coming into view off the terrace railings had always been a slippery place, as unsuited to straightforward investigations as it was to motorcars. No direct lines of sight, no firm foundation underfoot, not a simple Yes or No to be had. Façade here was treated as reality. A casual conversation would take a turn that landed a foreigner into a mire up to his waist.
What irritated him most was how it made him feel like a blustering Englishman, harrumphing over the antics of the blasted foreigners.
Startled, he looked across at his young wife, who had just broken the dawn’s stillness with a full-throated laugh.
Chapter Twenty-four
HOLMES ASKED WHAT I WAS laughing at, but I just shook my head and asked him how he intended to pass the day.
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are we not here to find your friend’s aunt?”
“I mean—”
“Russell, how do you propose to divide up our search area? There are three districts north of the Grand Canal, and three to the south. Further afield lie the Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore, followed by the Lido and Murano and Burano and several dozen other islands scattered across the lagoon. I should prefer not to be here until Easter.”
Why did I feel as if this were a test—one in which I was not performing very well? “Unless Vivian has found herself a deserted island, she’ll want a place she can blend in. We could begin with the San Marco area and work out, on this side of the lagoon, and at the northern end of the Lido on the other.”
“Showing her photographs to gondolieri and pawn brokers.”
“Well, she has to get around somehow, and she might need to sell the necklace, so yes to both. But also I’d say places with night-life. She used to love parties, and if she’s re-visiting her youth, that may be part of Venice’s appeal.”
“If night-life is her joy, she should have gone to Paris.”
That was certainly true: by last night’s evidence, most of Venice still took to their beds well before midnight.
“The wealthier visitors, Americans especially, have taken to hiring palazzos expressly so they can hold parties into the wee hours. I could speak to an estate agent and see about holding a few of our own. Tempt her to come to us.”
He did not quite shudder. “Those parties must endear them to their Venetian neighbours.”
“Or we could sail up and down the Grand Canal at night, peering through windows?”
“I shall begin with San Marco, and keep an ear out for the sites of festive affairs.”
He was being remarkably amenable. Suspiciously so. “Holmes, you don’t generally volunteer for the tedious parts of an investigation.”
“To search here through winter would leave me crippled with rheumatism.”
“Fine, though do feel free to take in the odd matinee if you like. And I shall go and build sand-castles on the Lido.”
“Metaphorical ones, I trust?”
“Not necessarily.”
After breakfast, I went for a quick raid on a series of tourist shops near the Piazza—and, I will admit, some touristic sight-seeing. After lunch, I boarded a lagoon steamer for the Lido, donning my dark-tinted spectacles and holding my new wide-brimmed hat clapped down against the wind. The straw shopping basket on my shoulder held a book, a beach towel, and a packet of cigarettes that I hoped I wouldn’t have to smoke. Nothing that I wore or carried was the least bit frilly or girlish. On the other hand, it stopped well short of bluntly masculine. I was not trying to look like a lesbian. My attire was merely…practical.
The Lido is a long, narrow sand-bar of an island that vaguely resembles a femur warped by rickets—slightly ironic, considering that large portions of it were devoted to Germanic hospitals and spas for skin diseases. In Shelley’s day, it was a stretch of sand and thistle, inhabited by lizards, useful for a morning gallop with one’s aristocratic poet friends. Now, to judge by the maps and what people said about the place, it was not likely that a poet could get his horse to a gallop without smashing into trams, pigeons, and sellers of lemon ices.
The Lido’s eastern shore, facing the open Adriatic, was where its beaches lay, and where expensive hotels had been built to house visitors like those two bronzed young Englishmen. For those staying in Venice proper, a vaporetto remedied the problem by flitting directly from the Riva degli Schiavoni to the Lido, without having to bother with any of the islands between. When we had tied up, eager beach-goers jostled past me towards the electric tram, which crossed the narrow patch of land before trundling down the waterfront to the Hotel Excelsior, one of the most expensive establishments in all of Europe.
I did not join the surge, choosing instead to stroll along the shops, gardens, and cafés towards the shops, terraces, and cafés of the public beaches. There were not only trams on the Lido, there were cars—and delivery lorries, vendors’ carts, bicycles, and all manner of transport that Venice itself lacked. It was busy, and noisy. The streets were crowded—and when I reached the shore, I found the beach even more so. Come August, the sand would be hidden beneath a pulsating mass of burning flesh, swimming costumes, and straw hats. As the road and tram-lines turned south, so did I: down the serried backs of a kilometre of bathing-huts, the sea visible in brief glimpses between them.
Then the road and tram-lines gave a jog, accompanied by a sharp division between the four-lira-a-day hired huts and the wide luxury cabanas that came with a room at one of the most fashionable hotels in Europe, where a night’s stay cost more than twice what Holmes and I were paying across the laguna.
The Grand Hotel Excelsior was the Queen of the Adriatic, a vast Moorish pleasure palace, the darling of the modern set. Cupolas and colonnades, tennis courts and cabaret, cocktails and fireworks, sun and sin—and although June was early for the English contingent, the London Season still being under way, I thought the Prohibition-racked Americans might be eager to start things early.
Today’s venture was by way of reconnaissance, since I anticipated that—despite the well-tanned skins of its two representatives at dinner last night—the Lido set would be more night-owl than sun-lark. I stood before the domes, flags, and minarets of the Excelsior, trying to make myself into
the kind of person who would stay there.
It might have been simpler to walk up to the desk and ask for a room. However, if it turned out that the hotel was full, I risked being recognised as a non-resident in future visits. Anonymous enquiry was one thing, but for today, I would depend on attitude…along with a blatant but casual flaunting of wealth.
I reached down to adjust the heavy bracelet I wore: a sizeable cluster of emeralds and gold, that was actually a necklace left me by my mother, wrapped several times around my right wrist. From a distance, it looked like an amusing piece of costume jewellery. Up close, when the quality came into view, my blithe display of something that would pay for a London terrace house could not fail to impress. The shock lay in the attitude.
No one questioned me as I strolled into the hotel’s vast and wind-swept foyer, my right arm reaching up as I passed through the beams of sunlight, green sparks blazing in all directions. I continued across the space to the beach-side doors, where I stood outside for a moment as if searching for a friend.
The beach-front play-ground before me was made up of groomed sand, substantial bathing-huts, bright canopies—and a strong wire fence down into the water that marked the southern border of the hotel’s property. The private beach had been raked clean of seaweed and looked to be as much broken shell as it was sand, making a pleasant sound underfoot. The cabanas with their striped awnings were arranged in a semi-circle, and it was easy to see that the closer one came to the water, the more luxurious the fittings and attentive the service. The northern border of the beach was a long, well-maintained pier, while directly off-shore was moored a floating island, occupied with lounging figures. All up and down the coast-line, I could see a number of long, thin jetties stretching out into the water, to provide for diving-platforms and, more prosaically, to eke a few more grains of sand from each passing wave.
When I saw a quartet of crop-haired women dressed in brightly-patterned silken pyjamas and bejewelled sandals walk laughing out onto the beach, I knew I was in the right place.