Then came the third section, the portion with only two floors. Thirty metres away, narrow stripes of light spilled from two windows, revealing wall, weeds, overgrown path, then sparkling water. We stood for a time, listening to the night: the sough of the wind; a susurration of water against moss-draped rock; the whine of a mosquito in search of blood. As I raised my collar against that last, I heard a sort of gulping squawk from farther up the island, followed by the faint, high thread of noise that was the voice of a bat.
No machinery, no gramophone records. Trams with iron wheels might have been a thousand miles away. Only the vague aroma of wood-smoke suggested that the building beside us was inhabited by human beings.
Holmes’ shoe gritted against the path as he moved forward. I followed, all senses alert. A bat darted through a shaft of light, hunting the attracted moths. When brightness lay at the very toes of our shoes, we stopped again to listen. Something large moved behind the shutters. A small metallic clatter was followed by a muttering voice.
Calf-high weeds lay between the path and the building, but nothing large enough—or sharp enough—to keep us from peering through the cracks. I allowed Holmes to continue to the far window, then together we crept forward.
The air smelt odd, the closer I drew to the lighted room, of chemicals and burning paraffin. Taking care not to touch the wood itself, I leaned forward to squint into the dazzle between the shutters.
A heavy line obscured the left-hand side of my vision, but beyond it was an array of glittering glass shapes and, oddly, some kind of chart on the wall. I gingerly moved over a step, to a spot where a gap between two boards offered a narrow horizontal view of the room.
Another heavy upright—and because I had recently spent a night in a room framed by precisely that view, I recognised it instantly: an iron bar, set into the window-frame between the closed shutter and the now-open glass pane behind. The glittering shapes were laboratory equipment: test tubes, flasks, alembics, and retorts—a Kipp’s apparatus stood to one side, identical to ours in Sussex, and as with our laboratory, the shelves held everything from homely baking soda to stoppered apothecary bottles whose labels wrapped halfway around the sides. Everything not on a shelf was lined up across a high wooden work-bench, along with an old-fashioned microscope, an electric desk-light for close work, several kinds of mortars and pestles, a Bunsen burner (currently unlit), three different sizes of mounted clamps, and various objects whose use I did not know. My gaze lifted to the back of the room: the charts included one of the blood flow in a human body, one with the muscles in a human body, and a third showing all the organs in a human body.
This would have been quite ominous enough, considering that Poveglia was an island from which passers-by heard shrieks and wails. But then I inched a bit farther over and what came into view froze me in my tracks. An autopsy table. It had draining troughs around the edges, an array of lights overhead, and a set of shelves with metal trays holding all the requisite scalpels, bone-saws, and mallets needed to open a corpse—everything but, I was extremely grateful to see, the corpse itself. The table held nothing but a crumpled rag.
Dear God, what was going on here?
When a white shape crossed my field of vision, it so startled me that I stepped back, catching my heel on a stone and nearly sprawling onto the ground.
I did manage to keep my own madhouse-shriek firmly behind my teeth. I took a deliberate breath, let it out, and brushed myself off—not looking to see if Holmes had noticed—before returning my eye to the crack.
It was a man in a doctor’s white coat, ill-shaven and haggard. His hair needed cutting—and combing and probably washing as well. The coat was riddled with unsavoury smears; its breast pocket bulged with writing implements and scraps of paper; one side-seam was torn up from the hem. His hands were nicked and discoloured, like Holmes in the throes of a chemical investigation. If I’d been told the man’s name was Moreau, I would not have doubted it for a moment.
He had crossed the room to mix something in one of the mortars, taking the stopper from a glass storage bottle and measuring out a scoop of some brilliant green powder resembling chromium oxide. I watched for a while, but despite having a first in chemistry, I could make no sense of what he was doing.
Perhaps Holmes would know.
In any case, the doctor appeared satisfied with the progress of his mixture. He abandoned it on the work-bench. Wiping his hands on the front of his coat, he went back across the room to the autopsy table. He pulled a tray from one of the shelves, removed a couple of instruments, and bent over the rag on the table.
Except it was not a crumpled rag. It was a creature, slightly larger than my fist—and when he picked it up to position it better under the lights, the long naked tail identified it.
A dissected rat is less troubling than a human autopsy, but still.
The man bent to his work. As he did so, a sound rose in the night, a sound that took a moment to identify: the man had begun to hum beneath his breath, a tuneless buzz of noise that, along with his nonchalant dabs and slices and flicking aside of scraps, set my skin to crawling.
Chapter Forty
I’D HAD ENOUGH—AND SO, I was grateful to see, had Holmes. We left our spy-holes and continued to the end of the building. No windows here, no autopsy tables, no rats, nothing but the sultry breath coming off the lagoon.
I gave an exaggerated shudder. Holmes started to reach for his cigarettes before he caught himself—he, too, appeared to have found the room troubling.
“Holmes, what the hell was that?”
“Curious, I agree.”
“Not the word I’d have used. Creepy, yes. Macabre? Disgusting? Just plain weird? God, yes.”
“Some of his equipment was remarkably out of date,” Holmes mused.
“Not that autopsy table,” I objected. It looked precisely like the one I’d tried to avoid the last time Lestrade dragged us into a murder investigation.
“True. And one of the graduated cylinders was made by the Corning company in America within the past ten years.”
I didn’t bother asking how he knew. “Holmes, we can’t leave Vivian here. Not with that going on.”
“Frankly, I am not sure precisely what was going on in that laboratory.”
“Creepy stuff? Autopsies?”
“Merely a necropsy. Unless you propose that a human might have a tail like that.”
Not unless that really was Dr Moreau—but I did not say it aloud. “I’m not sure it matters. Whatever he was doing, I doubt Ronnie and her mother would be happy to have Vivian anywhere near it.”
“You suggest we storm in and remove her forcibly from the premises?”
“Don’t you? Holmes, I know you brought your gun with you.” The care he had taken in keeping that side of his jacket away from me on the gondola and in the Runabout had made it obvious.
“Russell, your friend’s aunt has been here for some days—perhaps as long as a week and a half. Wouldn’t you prefer to approach her on, as it were, neutral territory? Miss Maxwell’s party is less than eighteen hours away.”
I counted wavelets for a while, watching the shimmer of light across the water. Then I sighed. He was right: Vivian might be here against her will; however, to be suddenly and violently wrenched out of her bed by an armed rescuer would be traumatic even for a woman of unquestioned stability.
“All right. But, Holmes—if she doesn’t show up at the Lido tonight, we’re coming here first thing Sunday morning to carry her out.”
Chapter Forty-one
WE RETURNED TO THE EXCELSIOR’S harbour in much the same way we had left: I paused to let Holmes off at its mouth on the lagoon. He created another distraction (not a fire this time) while I steered the valiant little boat up to its allotted berth. Somewhat short of petrol, true, but I hoped the Hon Terry would check the gauge before he ran it too far out from shore.
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I met Holmes (slightly out of breath) and we woke our snoring gondolieri, who rowed the distance from Lido to Piazza somewhat more slowly than they had on the way out. We took to our beds as the sun was turning the mist to warm pearl.
* * *
—
I woke to a faint sound. I remained face-down, vaguely trying to decide if I could ignore it or if I needed to leap into a posture of defence—and then Holmes, whose thoughts had clearly been running the same sleep-clogged track, identified the noise and rose.
It had been the whisper of an envelope slipped beneath our door. I patted the table for my spectacles, and sat up on the pillows to watch him walk across the room, ripping the flap of the telegram. He read the message without reaction, then handed it to me on his way to the desk telephone.
Mycroft had not bothered to put his reply in code, writing simply:
NAME IS THAT OF INCONVENIENT FIRST WIFE OF ITALIAN DUKE STOP YOUR LESSER ARISTOCRAT LEFT ENGLAND TWO DAYS BEFORE YOU DID STOP M
I read it a second time, my brain cells wrestling to attach the words to knowledge. At the third attempt, potential meaning took hold.
“Could he possibly mean the Dalser woman is Mussolini’s wife? That the President of Italy has locked up a woman in San Clemente?” I exclaimed.
“ ‘Duke’ does translate Il Duce.” He spoke into the telephone: “Buongiorno, Signore. Vorrei il caffè, per favore. Si, per due. Si. Grazie.”
“Mussolini. Good Lord, if the papers get wind of this…No wonder a Capitano is willing to go out every day to make sure she’s still there! And by ‘lesser aristocrat’ I suppose he means the Marquess? If so, the man must have left England—oh heavens, barely forty-eight hours after I talked to Ronnie. It’s my fault, for not making it clear that she shouldn’t tell her mother.”
“True. Although it does serve to confirm the location of all the players in our game.”
“I’d have been just as glad to leave the Marquess out of it.”
“I trust that whatever costume you have for tonight, it will permit you to take your gun?”
He’d eyed the boxes that our costumes had been delivered in, but not enquired further. I grinned. “Oh, yes.”
Coffee, breakfast, newspapers, food, and our toilettes took up the remainder of the afternoon. When Holmes came out of the bath, rubbing the towel on his jet-black hair, he stopped dead, glowering at the garments lying across the bed. For him, the Porters’ invitation had said: Come as a hero. For me, Elsa’s instructions were: Come as your true self.
“What is that?”
“Your costume, Holmes. Surely you know Zorro? Douglas Fairbanks? No? Never mind, put on some eye makeup and you’ll look perfect—and you can hide behind the hat if you need to. You’ll also find it a lot easier to play the violin in those than in some of the costumes the shop had on offer.”
His gaze travelled to the other set of clothing. “That looks like a man’s suit.”
“It is. But not just any man.” I put on the flesh-coloured half-mask attached to a pair of spectacles, over-sized circles I’d scoured the city to find—and which I’d then had fitted with actual, ground lenses, paying a small fortune to have them done overnight. Seeing no recognition dawn, I added the straw hat, then an expression of bland stupefaction. “Harold Lloyd? That’s all right, Holmes, everyone else will recognise it.”
It took some convincing for him to don the voluminous pirate’s blouse of heavy blue-black silk, the snug trousers, and the rakish scarlet sash that tied around his waist like a lopsided bustle. The hat was not exactly right, its brim being a touch too narrow, but he set his foot down at the red kerchief. “Russell, that is something Mrs Hudson would wear for attacking the cobwebs.”
“Well, I suppose you can just keep the hat on. And that moustache you’ve grown is close enough. Let’s see if we need to make adjustments to the mask.” Doing so cost him some hair, when he attempted to pull off what I’d tied snugly in place, but the eye-holes were sufficient. More or less.
“You might want to push the mask out of the way before you go down any flights of stairs, Holmes,” I suggested. “Especially if you’re wearing this.”
With a flourish, I pulled the pièce de résistance from its scabbard, slicing the bed-cover as I did so. I looked down in dismay. “Oh, dear. When I told the man to clean it up, I didn’t mean to sharpen it as well.”
My ageing Zorro came around the bed to gingerly take both rapier and scabbard. In his hand, the grip seemed to nestle into place, the length of shiny steel looking more like an actual weapon than a film prop. He tried it out in the air, quick flicks of the wrist that caused the metal to sing as it had not for me. “This is not a bad piece,” he said in surprise.
“No? Well, just make sure you don’t leave it lying about. Some drunken idiot could disembowel someone with it.”
When he was dressed for the night, his eyes darkened and hair sleeked back, he looked extraordinarily—yes—dashing. The only incongruity was the violin case. Knowing Holmes, once the instrument was tucked under his chin, it would seem a natural part of the Mexican hero’s costume.
I, on the other hand, looked like somebody who only had to walk past a house to have it fall on him, who would straighten up just as a beam swung past, who would walk out his door in a new white suit and bump into a child with a chocolate ice-cream cone…I gave the looking glass a smile of vacuous innocence, and ambled away towards the vaporetto.
Chapter Forty-two
HOLMES WALKED DOWN THE RIVA Degli Schiavoni and through the Piazza San Marco. He wore the Spanish don’s flat-brimmed hat, although the mask was tucked in the scarlet cummerbund—masks on public streets had been outlawed during the War, anonymity being seen as an invitation to crime, and there was no sign that the Fascists were good-humoured enough to lift the ban. A tourist might get away with nothing more than a stern warning, but an obscured face still attracted the kind of attention he did not at the moment wish. If the police were to stop him for the infraction, they would surely notice that the sword he wore was real. They might even go on to find the gun.
Better to invite the humour of passers-by and look like a damnable motion-picture player. Even the police didn’t take a middle-aged Zorro seriously—especially one carrying a violin case.
On he walked, across bridges, through the Piazza, winding through calli and fondamente and campi to the Grand Canal, where he paid double to have the traghetto cross the busy waterway trasversale, to drop him on the Ca’ Rezzonico steps.
The festivities would not get under way for another hour, but the palazzo was humming with activity—hanging up lanterns, mounting torches, taking delivery of trays and boxes. Six swarthy gentlemen, none under six feet tall and all with superbly defined muscles, stood ready to receive guests arriving by water. All six appeared to have climbed from their beds with their sheets clutched around them, although as Holmes drew nearer, he decided their dress was intended to be a sort of toga.
The night’s theme was “Come as a Hero,” but if these were intended to be gladiators, they were missing their swords.
“Seite romani?” he asked the large man who hauled him onto the mossy steps.
“Sorry, mate?”
Not Roman: Australian. “I was asking if you were meant to be ancient Romans?”
The man looked down at his skimpy cotton folds and the hairy knees below. “The lady said we was s’posed to be Greek.”
Ah: the brief garment was meant to be a Greek chiton, pinned at one shoulder. “Very handsome,” Holmes told him.
The large man tugged at the skirts, clearly uncomfortable with the fact that he was standing a good foot above the eye levels of the approaching guests. A gust of wind would be revealing.
Abruptly, the six men betrayed a shared military past by snapping to attention and all but clicking their rope sandals together. Holmes turned to
find Cole’s wife, Linda, in the doorway, her beautiful face wearing a professional smile. She was wrapped in a silken dressing-gown, makeup on but hair still pinned: either she was to be a hero of the boudoir, or she had yet to finish her own preparations. “Mr Russell, there you are—Cole was wondering if you were going to be late.”
Linda ran the household with an iron hand: being late, he had been informed early on, was a mortal sin that condemned a man to the eternal punishment of being removed from the Porter guest lists.
“I wouldn’t think of it,” he assured her.
She gave him a quick and dismissive nod, then addressed the smallest of the six would-be Greeks. “You may light the torches. You all know where the buckets are, in case of mishap?”
Six hands instantly snapped out to point at their nearest fire-buckets. Linda nodded, peered up and down the Canal in satisfaction, turned—and gave Holmes a surprised look, evidently having expected him to be on his way to report for duty. She slid her arm through his in a manner both friendly and decisive, moved him into the damp ground-floor portego as far as the workaday, non–ceremonial staircase, and launched him on his way. He continued upwards, smiling to himself. He liked Linda Porter, but as seemed to be the rule amongst Cole’s friends, thought it wise not to cross her.
He found Cole in one corner of the huge ballroom, wearing an open-necked shirt, twill trousers, and soft shoes over his customary white socks. The piano had been moved in and now sat on a low stage, along with an assortment of band equipment, from banjo to megaphone. Porter was playing a tune Holmes hadn’t heard before, jaunty on the surface but with an intriguing thread of melancholy. He paused, frowning at some technical problem Holmes couldn’t begin to guess, but when he reached for his cigarette, he noticed he wasn’t alone.
“Hey! That’s a dashing outfit.”
“So I am told.”