When Holmes was shown in to the inner room, just after midday, he found Cole Porter at a grand piano that in any other house would have been impressive, but here looked mildly apologetic. The pianist was making rapid-fire notations on music sheets propped on its rack, at his elbow a pietra dura table like a tapestry half-buried under a sprawl of newspapers, empty coffee cups, an overflowing glass ash-tray, and a cat.
The cat poured itself onto the floor and departed. The man kept writing, left-handed, wearing a dressing-gown and stubble despite the hour. His right hand stole along the keyboard as if under its own guidance. The melody reminded Holmes of something…
Yes: a song from that 1919 musical play. Was Porter even aware that his hand was picking out the notes of “I’ve Got Somebody Waiting”?
“You know what they call this floor of the house?” the younger man demanded without salutation, his slightly pop eyes squinted against the smoke from his dangling cigarette.
“In England we call it the first floor. Here it would be the piano nobile.”
“Exactly. The noble piano, and here we are, in my cosy little corner of the palazzo.” He plucked out the cigarette and stood to shake hands with his would-be violinist. “Morning, Mr Russell.”
“Mr Porter. So tell me: did this noble instrument come up the staircase, or was it raised by pulleys from the canal?”
Porter laughed. “The stairs—and they got this far and decided they’d have to take it apart to get it any further. But, how’d you guess it didn’t come with the place?”
“If it had, the tuning wouldn’t be going off.”
He grimaced. “I know, I got a guy coming this afternoon—always seems to take a couple weeks for the wood to settle down. Bring your fiddle?”
Holmes moved a silver candelabra off the stunning table, trying to ignore the drips of wax across a glorious lapis columbine, and set his case there instead. “I did. What are you working on?”
“Can’t call it work—I’m the laziest guy in town. And anyway, song-writing is a mug’s game. You give ’em your best, and they knock ’em to the side, one by one. No, songs are a good hobby. I play for my friends and they don’t complain.”
“You’re a bit young for retirement.”
“People like me are born retired. Anyway, I was just playing around with some ideas. A musical, you know? About a kid who shocks his family by falling for a Paris actress. What d’you think?”
“It sounds the sort of thing for which Broadway is known.”
“Think so?”
“Perhaps a bit…light.”
Porter crushed out his burning stub in the Murano glass bowl, spilling ash across a king’s ransom of inlay work. “Yeah, well, I wrote a nice serious piece—‘Within the Quota.’ Lotsa yawns. Didn’t even cover its costs.”
“Perhaps a satiric commentary on America’s repressive 1921 immigration law would have translated better into opera than it did a ballet. A modern-day La Bohème.”
“You know it? Jeez. I bet you’ve been talking to Linda. Did she tell you she had me doing fugues and symphonies with Stravinsky? At the Schola Cantorum?”
“Linda is your wife? I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“She’ll be back soon, I’d guess. Yeah, those fugues nearly killed me—I used to sneak out to the Folies Bergère for some fresh air. No, I’m better at snappy love, the music and lyrics. Oh, and college fight songs—I’m hot at those. If only Broadway wanted football-love ballads. Catchy, finger-clicking music. You know?”
As the composer talked, Holmes had taken out his violin and set it beneath his jaw to check that it hadn’t lost its tune—so he replied to Porter’s question by dashing the bow into a climbing progression leading to the maudlin opening notes of Porter’s song “Old Fashioned Garden.” The younger man threw back his head in laughter, then pounced on the keys, adding flourishes of ridiculous complexity as he warbled the words to a tune that had sounded out of date when it was new, six years before. His voice was nasal; his playing was flawless.
At the end, his supple fingers continued on into another run of notes, uncertain and unfinished. “Problem is,” he mused, “I get tired of shallow music. It’s like people who are pretty on the surface but have nothing below.” His fingers pounded a march down the keys, dull feet descending a staircase. “So booorrrriiing. Give me a song with layers to it—or a person who’s pretty on the surface but smart or clever or even vicious underneath…” The illustrating tune shifted to a light but minor-chord tinkle, the sort of music to warn an audience in a picture house. “Now, that kind of person does something to me.”
Violence, perhaps? thought Holmes.
“Of course, a pretty face with a brain behind it—like Linda—or a song that sounds simple until you start to think about it…those are worth spending time on.”
“That is true for many kinds of art. Poetry certainly. Japanese prints. Fairy tales.”
“You’re right about that last. Some of those fairy tales—all very well and good till the lights went off and then, wow! Used to give me nightmares. Red Riding Hood’s grandma gobbled up by a wolf. Sleeping Beauty poisoned by her own stepmother. I remember lying awake in my bed wondering what the hell Goldilocks was doing in the woods all on her own.”
“Along with Hansel and Gretel, it is one of several variations on the Babes in the Wood story.”
“Babes in the wood, eh? Catchy.”
“Two wealthy orphans are given to a greedy uncle, who decides to have them killed, only to have the soft-hearted hired murderers abandon them in the forest instead.”
Porter reached for his cigarettes. “And some creature finds them and raises them, so they can grow up and take their revenge, right?”
“Actually, in the original story the children die and the woodland creatures cover their bodies with leaves.”
The cigarette lingered, unlit. “Not sure I don’t like it better my way.”
“Broadway would,” Holmes said dismissively. “Now, have you decided what sort of music you want on Saturday? Porter? Mr Porter?”
The pianist absently discarded the unlit cigarette and picked up his pencil instead, pawing through the sheet music for a blank page.
Half an hour later, having filled his eyes with Tiepolo and Colonna, with Allegories and gods and the family pope, Holmes heard his name echo along the piano nobile. He made his way back through the live-in museum to the composer, who was still on the piano bench, looking cross. “I thought you were here to work?” Porter demanded.
“I was allowing you to think,” Holmes replied mildly. “Shall we continue?”
They worked—if work described it—for a couple of hours before Cole’s wife swept in, tut-tutting at his unshaven face and silken gown. Linda turned out to be American, too, with a well-tended Kentucky drawl and an air of brooking absolutely no nonsense when it came to her husband’s comfort or his work.
It was instantly clear that Cole adored her—worshipped her, needed her, and consulted her on everything. Including, or so the gondoliers’ rumour had it, his liaisons with pretty young men. “Mr Russell, you know my wife?”
Holmes rose as Linda came into the salon. “I have not had the pleasure.”
“What? Linda, there’s someone in this fair city you haven’t laid claim to? Linda, this is Sheldon Russell, fiddler supreme—you’ll find he has lovely manners. Mr Russell, Linda Porter, the queen of my heart, the tyrant of my schedule, you’ll come to love her despite her frightening abilities—all my friends fall in love with her, don’t they, dearest?”
“Good to meet you, Mrs Porter. Mr Porter, I’ll be off now, let me know if you’d like me to—”
“Oh you can’t go, I forbid it, we’ve hardly started.”
“Cole, dear, lunch is in nine minutes, Gerald and Sara are starving, and that strange little prince fellow who followed you in yesterday is here. And before you ask, no, you can’t come to lunch in your dressing-gown.”
“I’m running, see me go? But surely we can throw another plate on the table? Mr Russell and I are having such a good time.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think of—” Holmes began.