At the name of the city, I looked up. “Is this brother by any chance a member of the Milizia Nazionale?”
Holmes smiled. “More than a member. Renato Francoletti is a Capitano.”
Yes, he could have led with that revelation, but I could not begrudge him his little drama. Although it did make me very aware of the terror of a certain San Clemente guard, and the thud of heavy boots. “Good to know. But do make sure there are plenty of people around if you ask him about Vivian.”
“I imagine, given the surroundings, it would be no difficult thing to turn the talk to mad English-speaking visitors.”
“Take care, Holmes.”
“Don’t I always, Russell?”
“Frankly, no.”
I sat for a moment, thinking over what the last two days had brought us.
I now had: an entrée to the Lido set, and with it an American party-organiser and a number of new acquaintances with varying degrees of money, wit, social rank, sobriety, and sexual conformity. A trip to San Clemente had added to my store two gondolieri; a confirmation that Vivian was not in that particular manicomio; an unsought mystery woman with Fascist connexions; and a greater appreciation for the homely Oxfordshire punt.
Holmes, in the meantime, had assembled: one weathered violin; a platoon—if not a company—of waterborne Irregulars; an introduction to Venice’s Milizia Nazionale; a growing intimacy with the city’s by-ways; and what could only be called a friendship with an unusual young musician. My mind did, I admit, stick a bit on this last one.
“You seem to like this Mr Porter.”
“He interests me. And he is remarkably talented, if he can find a way to keep his temptations under control.”
I studied Holmes: aquiline features, expressive hands, a slim and wiry figure that belonged to a younger man. “Er, Holmes. Do you think…I mean, this Porter fellow is fairly…notorious. Is it possible he—that is, I assume you made it clear…”
“That I am not, as they say, ‘interested’? Yes, Russell, the man does seem capable of mere friendships. He is under no delusion that I will fling down my violin and shower him with—”
“Holmes, stop, for God’s sake!” Of all the images I did not want in my mind’s eye! “I simply wanted to be sure you weren’t…”
“ ‘Leading him on’?”
“Holmes, your well of English threatens to be permanently defiled by the Porter crowd—but yes, that’s what I meant.”
“No. Music is our shared language, one in which he is remarkably fluent.”
“Fine. Just so—oh, never mind.”
“I must go. Will your admirer with the speed-boat be returning you again tonight?”
“I may ask my two other gentlemen admirers to bring me back, rather more sedately. Giovanni and Carlo.”
“Have a charming afternoon,” said my husband, to all appearances utterly unconcerned by the growing list of gentlemen at his wife’s beck and call.
Chapter Thirty-six
THE FRANCOLETTI PALAZZO, LIKE MOST of its type, had two entrances, the one on the water being its more ornate and ceremonial. As Holmes walked past the workaday back doors onto the campo, he noticed that they stood open, revealing a housemaid scrubbing the aged tiles of the ground-floor portego. He continued into the campo, vexed—as he generally was in this most uncooperative of cities—by the choice of exits on which to keep watch: water landings and terrestrial doorways were invariably on a building’s opposite sides. However, in this case, the campo’s end (as his map had suggested) was open onto the waterway. A motor-launch stood at the palazzo’s landing, with a liveried attendant to suggest a possible imminent departure.
To his pleasure, there was even a caffè convenient to his task of keeping watch, which provided not only a view of the canal and a tiny jolt of espresso, but the previous day’s Messaggero as well.
He settled to the headlines: Amundsen’s North Pole flight crews had, against all expectations, survived, dropping out of the sky in Norway; the Fascist Party Congress was claiming many triumphs in Rome; the Geneva Protocol now prohibited the use of weapons such as tear gas. Before his cup was empty, the palazzo’s door came open and discharged three men wearing the black of the Milizia. One stepped casually into the waiting motor-boat, the other two were less confident. Strangers to Venice.
The launch—which had either come in from the other direction, or been laboriously backed along the narrow waterway—started up. As it passed the fondamenta on which the tables had been set out, Holmes raised the paper and listened with care. The Venetian native was speaking excellent English, but slowly. One of his companions—the one leaning towards him with a frown—was less fluent in the language.
“—will be most impressed with what we are building on Marghera. We will be able to bring in the very biggest ships, and Venice will become…”
As the boat negotiated a turn in the canal, sunlight fell upon the object of Francoletti’s lecture: a burly and distinctly English face, paying avid attention to claims of a grand future.
The Marquess of Selwick. The Fascists will be looking for those in power that they might infect.
Such as an ambitious and impatient aristocrat, sympathetic to the Fascist cause, who has reason to come to the Fascist homeland. Naturally, he gets in touch with the local authorities to help locate his sister. But if, once there, he is met by a powerful and like-minded colleague? If the two men look at each other and see enormous potential?
Then Mycroft’s prediction becomes correct: Fascism gains a foothold in England.
There was little point in racing to hire a boat and follow the men: they would be gone for the rest of the day. Holmes finished his coffee and the newspaper, thumbed a coin into the saucer, then walked off through the by-ways in the direction of Ca’ Rezzonico.
The house was just waking, but Holmes was amused to find that “practicing for Saturday night” had almost immediately been swept aside in favour of, “Say, what do you think of this?” Holmes began to realise that, at home in Paris, where he spoke the language, Porter had a whole community of musicians to call upon. Here in Venice, if he wanted company at the piano, he had to make do with a near-to-elderly amateur violinist.
For in the Porter household, “company” was paramount. Cole Porter did not let his musical hobbies get in the way of his social life. And yet Holmes could see that a portion of the man’s brain worked even as he drank and laughed with his unending stream of visitors—and while he slept, probably. The man seemed to spin words and music as a peasant woman spun her thread: at all spare moments, in all circumstances, without appearing to be aware of it as labour.
Take Holmes’ jocular agreement, on their previous meeting, to a suggested afternoon of irresponsibility. “Let us misbehave,” Holmes had said, and instantly regretted the phrase, less for its sentiment than for its jarring discord with the personality he was putting forth.
Neither Porter nor his wife seemed to notice, which was all to the good—and he had taken greater care to act the easily amused elder statesman at the luncheon and musical afternoon that followed. But clearly the phrase had stuck in the man’s ear and, over the past twenty-two hours, been harvested, cleaned, combed, and was now in the process of being spun into thread.
The stilted suggestion was now an informal encouragement: “Let’s Misbehave.” Of course, the saucy lyrics that followed would never find a publisher, much less a stage anywhere in the vicinity of Broadway or the West End, but it was a rough first attempt, and Holmes suspected that Porter would keep tinkering with it until he had a song whose language would pass in mixed company, even if its sentiments would bring a blush to the cheeks of a sexagenarian detective.
(And what might the man do with a song based on the Latin numbers—quart, quint, sex, sept…)
Holmes caught himself, cleared his throat, and said, “Now, as to your guests tomorrow night
: I would imagine that some of them might find the tunes of the 1890s more familiar than those of last year’s, er, ‘hits’?”
Chapter Thirty-seven
MY MORNING DRAGGED, NO EASIER on this side of the lagoon than the other. I dawdled, I bathed, I tried to read, I drummed my fingers, and I finally took the Excelsior’s launch over to the Lido.
Where I dawdled, drummed my fingers some more, and finally went for a long walk down the island and back up again.
Upon my return, about a third of the cabanas were occupied, including that of Elsa Maxwell.
“Hello there, darlin’,” she greeted me. “You’re up and about early.”
“Oh, I don’t sleep a lot.”
“I know the problem, dearie. Have a drink.”
“Thanks, maybe some coffee. I don’t suppose you’ve seen Terry yet?”
“Oh, we probably won’t see him for a while; he went off with somebody pretty last night.”
Not, I thought, a girl. I hid my deep sigh and asked the hovering attendant for an espresso, settling in for another useless day among the lotus eaters.
But shortly after midday, a most unexpected sight came marching down the row of cabanas: a young man’s legs in a swimming costume, the upper part of him hidden behind a pair of long Alpine skis balanced across his shoulders. Elsa’s cabana fell silent. Her film star turned to see what had caught our attention. Soon, all eyes were on the approaching figure. The legs came to a halt; the long wooden objects swung down to rest on the sand. It was the Hon Terrence, my admiring boatman, grinning hugely.
I wondered if he might require a nice calm rest period amongst the San Servolo lunatics.
Elsa spoke first. “Terry, dear, you’re a few hundred miles and a whole lot of clothing away from using those things.”
“No, dear thing, I ordered these ’specially. Have you any idea how hard it is to buy a pair of skis in the summer? I heard about this American who’s skiing on water. Just tie a rope to the boat and hold on, and Bob’s your uncle.”
“Sounds like a great way to break your neck,” Elsa commented, but not everyone was of the same opinion. In two minutes flat, Terry was headed towards his speed-boat with three other handsome young men, none of whom was named Bongo. The women around me watched the mass retreat, sighing.
“Such a pity,” one of the girls murmured, and returned to her sun-worship.
Thus the afternoon was enlivened by the sight of Terry’s speed-boat practicing brief bursts of speed just beyond the swimmers—very brief bursts of speed, for the most part. One time a figure managed to stay upright for nearly three triumphal seconds before shooting head over heels into a great gout of water, and the big engine cut again.
After an hour and a half of abortive and no doubt cumulatively painful efforts, the sleek boat turned for shore, tying up at the splendid Excelsior pier that stretched out into the sea. The four men walked down the boards and up the beach, three of them rubbing aching shoulders, all of them looking glum.
Their welcome was none too sympathetic. What, had they thought that since snow was water, skis would work on the wet kind, too? And had anyone actually seen this American alleged to have done it? Well, walking on water had always been something of a miracle. Maybe they’d start selling floating boots so people could walk over to San Marco instead of waiting for a vaporetto.
And so on.
I, however, had been watching with an eye to the physics of the problem, and finally took pity on the poor Hon Terrence. “You know,” I pointed out, “if you leaned back far enough, it might force all the weight onto the flat of the skis. It’s when the tips dig in that you get in trouble.”
Four handsome young faces stared at me, but only one with an expression of hope. “You think so?” Terry asked.
“One would have to be strong enough to fight the pull. And the person driving the boat would need to control the speed, too. That’s a lot of factors to balance.”
To my astonishment, he took the remark as an offer. He reached down and seized my hand, yanking me to my feet. “Great! Let’s try it.”
I snatched back my hand. “Oh no, I’m not risking two dislocated shoulders, thank you very much. And I was hoping to see your friend Bongo.”
“Oh, he won’t be here for hours. And I’ll do the skiing. You can drive.”
“I’ve never piloted a boat before—well, not one like yours.”
“You can drive a car, can’t you? Bright girl like you, we’ll be zipping all over in no time.”
He seized my hand again—so I grabbed my hat and let him pull me along.
Terry was, in fact, a clever teacher, with little of the patronising attitudes one becomes accustomed to in a lesson involving males and machinery. Perhaps he was merely so eager to get on with the challenge of skis on water, he forgot he was showing the details of ignition, throttle, and acceleration to a girl.
I killed the engine only once.
Out on the water, I practiced a series of gradual accelerations. When I was satisfied that I understood the sequence, if not the actual speed required, I let him jump into the water with his two wooden planks and the length of rope.
The first failure was mine, when I took off too fast for him. The second was his, when he failed to lean back. The third attempt saw him teeter upright, hold for a count of one, two—then make a spectacular somersault with both skis flying.
He was laughing in exhilaration when I brought the boat past him again, and grabbed the trailing tow-rope.
Half a dozen more attempts, and he was skiing, on the water, upright, in the centre of twin sprays taller than he.
Water-skiing had come to the Lido.
* * *
—
I made the Hon Terry stop before he drowned of exhaustion. He couldn’t make it on board without my help. As I made for the Excelsior pier, he lay belly-down over the motor-housing, chin on forearms, telling me what he’d learned and how Buff and Jiggles had been doing it wrong and how it might be easier with a wider ski. When he finally ran dry, I ventured a question about Bongo.
“Bongo?”
“Yes, your friend, remember? We were going to ask him about the Cinderella from the other night?”
“Right! Yes, Bongo—oh, I think he’s gone.” I came a hair’s breadth from wrapping the anchor rope around his neck and shoving him back over the side. Fortunately, I delayed long enough for him to finish the thought. “No, that’s next week, Puffer’s the one leaving today. Bongo had to go hold the hand of an aged aunt, or a bank manager, or something. He should be back—ah, wait. Yes, you’ve conjured the devil!”
I followed his gaze to the Excelsior’s decorative wharf, where a dozen or more nicely endowed young men leapt about, arms waving in wild approval. Terry sat upright—stifling a groan—and swung his feet onto the passenger seat, both arms slowly rising up for a return salutation. One of the greeting committee was indeed remarkably tall, and his head noticeably under-sized.
“Oy!” The boys at the dock having come into shouting distance, Terry shouted. “You lot see that? I told you there was such a thing—all you need’s a brilliant driver!” And to me he added, “Go ahead and take her in here; they’ll move her into the harbour before dark.”
As the Runabout nudged up against the structure, Terry jumped stiffly out—to be boosted onto the shoulders of his mates and carried in triumph down the boards. They’d have carried me, too, had I not clung to the wheel and threatened to dive over the side. I watched them go, keeping a close eye on the elusive Bongo—at which point Terry won my undying love and devotion by catching his friend’s attention and sending him back to me.
Bongo loomed. I felt like climbing up onto the engine housing to keep from getting a crick in my neck. But Bongo was a simple soul, the kind of retriever-dog, country-house, tweed-and-shotgun Englishman one did not expect from (I had gathered from t
he gossiping hordes) the son of three generations of mine-owners.
“Terry said you wanted to talk to me?”
I introduced myself and stuck out my hand. He eyed it, causing me to wonder if he’d ever shaken a woman’s hand before, but gamely wrapped his paw around mine and let me move his arm up and down a few times. “Lovely to meet you, Bongo, thanks for coming back. Yes, it seems a friend of mine was at the ‘do’ last Saturday. Terry said you’d spotted her—you called her ‘Cinderella’?”
“You know her?” His face took on a look of such pleasure and longing, it was painful to witness. “Oh, she’s the most…I saw her and thought…I couldn’t believe such a creature…”
“Terry said you followed her when she left. Did you by any chance see what direction she went in?”
“Oh, I tried, I really did. When I saw her, I…Oh, it took me all night to…I’d just worked myself up to going over and seeing if she’d dance with me when I realised she was gone. Gone! I ran out of there so fast I knocked over a couple of waiters, and started grabbing people until they’d tell me which way she went. I got to the harbour just as she was pulling away, she and that dark girl in the evening suit. I ran—and I run fast—but when they got to the water and opened up, I lost them. It was dark,” he explained sadly, as if to say that had it been daylight, he’d have followed them across the lagoon.
“Which way did they go?”
His left hand came out, pointing to ten o’clock. Which, although it eliminated only half the lagoon, still helped.
But first: “Um, Bongo—James: About this Cinderella. I’d forget about her, if I were you. I don’t think she’s really interested in men.”