“It is not at—”
“Yes, I would like a glass of wine, thanks.” I smiled up at the gentleman lingering behind Holmes’ shoulder, by way of reassurance that we were not about to start flinging the crockery.
Sensibly, once we had chosen a wine (which took some time) and ordered dinner (which took considerably less), Holmes did not return to the topic of unexplained travel. Instead, after some tiny adjustments to his silver and an application of butter to bread roll, he asked if I had any further thoughts as to a plan of action.
We had debated just this question all the way across Europe, without coming up with a firm outline for action. Granted, Venice was a small city, in acres and in citizens. And granted, it had a clearly delineated population of foreigners. However, simply to wander the calli and canals looking for Vivian Beaconsfield did not seem an efficient use of our time. Might as well take up a table at Florian’s and wait for her to walk past.
So as I had done at various points along the train route here, I ticked off on my fingers the things we knew about Ronnie’s aunt. “She’s English. She’s blonde. She’s a lesbian. She’s artistic. And she’s more than a little unbalanced. Together, those make for a Venn diagram with a narrow point of overlap. Someone will have noticed her.”
“Perhaps,” Holmes mused, “I might take the ‘artistic’ sub-set, rather than the lesbian?”
“Agreed. Unless you brought along a woman’s wig and clothing?”
“I did not anticipate an invitation to a Carnevale party, no.”
“Pity.”
Once upon a time, Carnevale took over the streets in Venice building up to Lent, but that was one of the things dragged away by Napoleon’s conquest: forbidden by the humourless Austrians, forgotten under decades of economic malaise, and banned again during the Great War. Venice still held the occasional masked ball, but these were private affairs, beloved primarily by foreigners.
Perhaps, considering Lady Vivian’s fondness for masks, I should add a sixth area to our search: the knick-knack souvenir shops of San Marco?
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 ma?tre 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 ma?tre 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.