To his surprise, he had become mildly interested in the situation—Mycroft’s situation, at any rate. He’d come here thinking that a report on Italian Fascism was a task any journalist could have done, but moving through Venice the day before, he’d begun to realise the delicacy of the matter. Who was the Fascist here? The Blackshirt, yes—but what about the Carabinieri? The polizia? The mayor, the gondolier, the waiter overhearing conversations, the greengrocer around the corner from Fascist headquarters?
If a Blackshirt felt free to beat up a clumsy passer-by, what act could six Blackshirts goad each other into? And what might they do to an inquisitive foreigner? In his thirties, Sherlock Holmes might have welcomed an opportunity to match physical skills with a bully, but he’d found himself less eager as the decades went by.
He wished he understood the world’s fascination with Venice. The city had long shed any position of import in the world’s affairs, becoming an ornate and empty picture-frame, a crumbling play-ground for the rich and romantically deluded. Were it not for the sure knowledge of what was to come—knowledge available to any student of history, or even of basic psychology—he might even have some sympathy for the Fascist desire to clean the place up.
He did agree with his brother, that there would be another War. And he was beginning to think that the Fascisti would be at the front of things—although it was difficult to predict whether Italy or Germany would set the first match to the tinder of post-war bitterness and economic loss. Perhaps in the next War, more of the bombs would come down away from the canals and lagoon, and free up a bit of real estate, as the Zeppelins had done for London.
In the meantime, he had promised his assistance to both members of his family, and he did not think either missing aristocrats or loose-tongued Fascists would pass beneath his balcony and save him from looking. He crushed out the half-smoked stub and checked his watch: that third pawn shop he’d been to the previous day would open in an hour. Plenty of time for a visit to the steam-baths near La Fenice, to indulge in a nice, close shave.
Two hours later, he was back in the room: clean, pounded, chin shaved, moustache trimmed, and the owner of a new violin.
It was not a particularly good instrument, and in a dryer climate might set his teeth on edge. Here, the warm damp air softened the wood enough to give the sound shape. And once he had replaced its worn steel strings with proper gut…
The result was surprisingly full. Satisfied, he settled in to reconstruct Mr Porter’s tunes—first, one he’d heard at the Winter Garden four years before, then the one that stood out in the New Oxford the following year.
Ghastly shows, of a sort he’d never have submitted to of his own will, but now he was just as glad that he’d been forced to follow a long-time (and now, long-behind-bars) quarry into those depths of human endeavour, the music halls.
Were Mr Cole Porter to raise himself up above that level of entertainment, the young man might have something to offer the world.
He put away the instrument when the sun had passed its zenith, and went to occupy his afternoon with Mycroft’s tasks. Once, coming out of an antiquarian bookseller (a man whose brother was in the Milizia Nazionale), he heard a familiar voice and looked down the zig-zag alleyway at his wife. Russell was laughing at something her diminutive companion had said. She did not spot him, although he followed for a few minutes until the two women stepped into a purveyor of silks, and he left them to it.
He returned to the Beau Rivage in early evening, to leave the books and fetch the violin. Before they’d boarded the train in London, he’d known that Russell’s chosen hotel would probably not serve his purposes—not even those that Mycroft had thrust upon him. Were this a British establishment, he’d have surreptitiously negotiated with the staff to come and go through a back door, but here, it was simpler to buy one’s invisibility outright. So yesterday, after he’d set the gondolieri to their necklace-hunt, he’d continued into the darker, less salubrious corners of the city. There he found a room costing precisely one-tenth the tariff of the Beau Rivage, with approximately a twentieth the square footage and no amenities whatsoever—except for the invaluable one of relative anonymity. Not that people here would not talk—but the tight neighbourhoods of Venice meant that talk would take longer to spread.
His trip through the pawn shops had furnished the room with an entire change of clothing, hat to shoes—perfectly acceptable clothing, but of a sort that would have caused the concierge of the Beau Rivage to direct him towards the kitchen entrance. The suit was a touch old-fashioned, the shoes a trifle worn, the clothes more suited to a commercial traveller than a touristic one. Or, perhaps, to an itinerant musician.
By dusk, he was entertaining the diners at a restaurant very near the Grand Canal, waiting for a signal that the Cole Porters were passing by.
Chapter Twenty-seven
THE STEAMER THREW ITS ROPES over the bollard on the Lido dock. My impulse was to turn immediately back, in hopes of catching some trace of the man who looked like the Marquess of Selwick, but that would be a fool’s errand. Instead, I let myself be swept ashore with the rest, again by-passing the trams in favour of walking an indirect route across the sand-bar island. As I went, I tried to force the dark preoccupation from my mind. It was a face like any other. The man would not have dropped everything and come here. It had not been him.
I gave my thoughts a hard shake and shoved them ruthlessly away. Time to don my mask for the gilded set.
I have spent most of my life an outsider, both by nature and through the circumstances of my history. Divided between England and America, Jew and Christian, wealthy and not—even before meeting Sherlock Holmes, I’d had a lot of experience with forging identities to fit a given situation.
Sometimes, the best approach was that of a social chameleon, echoing a group’s behaviour from vocabulary and accent to gestures and bodily stance. Intense and rapid research is key, and the higher the status of a group, the more precarious the act: one small class-related slip—a misplaced phrase, a moment’s uncertainty over a choice of fork—and the switch of disapproval is thrown, forevermore.
The other approach is that of coquette. Not that simple eyelash-fluttering and the tapping of a boy’s sleeve would suffice here: a crowd that included the wealthy and the politically dominant would be wary of, and amused by, any attempt at open seduction.
No, coquetry here would need to play on the weakness of this specific group. Namely, these people would not believe that any person might consider them inferior. Thus, they would be unable to resist someone who apparently did.
Because any woman who found the smart crowd dull must be fascinating indeed.
I directed my steps down along the backbone of the Lido, feeling the excitement build around me—and the closer to the great hotels, the more focussed the energies.
It had just gone ten o’clock. The guests were moving from dining room to Chez Vous, the Excelsior’s cabaret that opened into the gardens. As I found the day before—and as I counted on tonight—no one seeing my garb and attitude questioned my right to be there. However, when it came to paying for the drinks I intended to order, that might be another matter. Not drinking would be a mistake; cash payments would stand out; I required a…sponsor, shall we say. Albeit an unwitting one.
So as I passed through the noisy crowd, my little beaded bag happened to slip from my wrist. I stooped to retrieve it—and came away with the key I had seen protruding from a rotund gentleman’s pocket.