My fingers managed to extract the cork. I poured water down my throat. I sat as we slid between San Giorgio and the Giudecca, and out into the San Marco Basin. Just before I stirred, to remind him of our bet, Giovanni spoke.
“My sister, the mother of Carlo, she is there in that place. Her husband”—both men paused to hawk and spit over the side—“came into money. Not a lot, but money. And so he has a pretty young girl, in Mestre, and my sister, she gets a little angry one day as she is making ravioli and hits him with her ravioli pin. He shout, the polizia come, and my sister, she keep hitting, and so…We think, San Clemente a good place to rest, to be calm, si? But her husband”—again the noisy demonstration of disgust—“he pay to keep her there. The judge agree, because she hit the polizia, and because the judge a friend of her husband”—it seemed as automatic a gesture as the sign of the cross—“she stay there.”
“For how long?”
“Two year, three month.”
“Good Lord. Can’t you get another judge to hear the case?”
“He will not. Her husband”—hawk; spit—“is now member of Milizia Nazionale.”
A Blackshirt. Was that him on the launch? No—the Capitano was too young. Still, the mere sight of his clothing would explain why they had hurried to get out of its way.
Near the entrance to the Grand Canal, Giovanni asked where I wished to go.
I pointed ahead of us, just past San Marco. “I’m staying at the Beau Rivage.”
He corrected our angle, and soon put in amongst the forest of pilings. Carlo held us against the dock as Giovanni handed me up and out, waiting politely as I retrieved money from my purse. I added a dignified sum on top, to make up for the blow his masculinity had suffered in turning his boat over to a woman, then paused, purse in hand.
“Giovanni, would you like to work for me for a few days? Esclusivamente?”
The negotiations took a while, and had they been written down would have had enough codicils and amendments to satisfy an Inner Temple barrister, but in the end, I had a pair of taxi drivers available to me day or night, at a daily rate that would be added to depending on how much and at what time I required their service. I handed over the first day’s fee and wrote down his instructions on how a message might reach him, day or night. We three shook hands, and parted amidst the consternation of half a dozen more handsome and more decoratively dressed gondolieri, who were clearly wondering what I saw in these two poorly-turned-out examples of their breed. And though I hadn’t specified that their contractual obligations included complete discretion, I thought I might have gained it, regardless, if for no reason other than their pleasure of keeping secrets from their fellows.
Back at the hotel, I called for food, drink, and a large bowl of ice for the swelling in my pained hands. I sated my gut, soothed my hands, sluiced the day’s soil off the rest of me, and finally stretched out to read what Mark Twain had to say about Venice. Three lines in, I fell into a dark and bottomless hole.
Chapter Thirty-two
HOLMES DRAGGED ME FROM THE dark hole no more than two minutes later. I cursed him under my breath, then gasped as I tried to shift the huge weight of my body on the bed: somebody had lit me on fire.
“What is wrong with you?” My unfeeling husband had crashed in, thrown what sounded like a full drum set onto the marble floor, and set off a Niagara in the bath-room taps.
“Oh God,” I wheezed. “I’ve strained every muscle in my body.” Even the arches of my feet felt pulverized.
“What was that?” His huge bellow echoed through the room, or perhaps just through my skull. I moaned. When he dropped onto the edge of the bed so as to hear me, the reverberations made me whimper. “Russell, are you injured?”
To give him credit, he did by now sound a bit concerned, although less than he might have been if he’d actually seen blood on the floor. Cautiously, I worked myself up a little on the pillows, trying to ease my burning neck and shoulders. “Holmes, have you ever rowed a gondola?”
The heartless scoundrel actually laughed. “Oh, yes. It makes use of muscles one didn’t realise one had. Let me add some more heat to the bath.”
He dumped a hefty dose of brandy into a glass and placed it in my hand. When it was gone and the bath-tub filled, he helped me stand, helped me cross the room, helped me into the water.
More brandy; two aspirin; heat.
Twenty minutes later, I thought I might live.
The shower-bath next door ran for a while. He came back in, gleaming and shaven, carrying a third dose of painkiller, and turned on the hot tap for a while—too long a while, in fact.
“Stop, Holmes—I feel like the entrée in a cannibal feast.”
He closed the tap. “How far did you row?”
“From Santa Maria to the start of San Giorgio.”
“Then I imagine you’re more than ready for dinner. Shall I have it brought up?”
“I just ate a platter of sandwiches. Wait: is it dark already?”
“It has been for some time.”
I’d slept for considerably more than two minutes. Long enough that dinner on our terrace, without having to struggle into formal dress, sounded an excellent idea.
From soup to nuts, I slowed down only as I approached the zabaglione. The waiters, who had been in and out serving the various courses, poured our coffee and left us to the night.
I felt nearly human.
Holmes propped up his heels and balanced his coffee atop his thighs, a manoeuvre that would have me leaping up from the scalding liquid in my clothing. I set my own cup on the table beside my chair, and enjoyed the lack of pain.
“You appear to have missed the last vaporetto to the Lido,” he noted.
“Not tonight. And lest you think it’s because I’m exhausted, I decided against it before the day’s adventures. Best not to appear too eager.” Or—yes—to collapse face-down on the table. And before I did so here—“Holmes, can you get a coded message to your brother?”
“Rather than a trunk call?”
“I may be a touch paranoid, but I don’t imagine dictators would hesitate to listen in on international telephone calls. And when it involves the lives of innocents…”
“What do you need?”
“There’s a woman named Dalser in the San Clemente asylum who has something to do with the Fascists. I don’t know her first name, but the mere mention of her makes the residents sweat with terror. And, there’s a militia Captain who comes all the way out to the island for a daily report on her.”
“Suggestive.”
“And while you’re wiring to Mycroft, could you also ask him to check on the whereabouts of the Marquess? I don’t really think it was Lord Selwick I saw, but still, I’d be happier to know he’s in England.”
Without comment, he set his cup on the table and went to find paper and pencil, to compose a coded message that seven hundred miles and three languages’ worth of telegraphist could not render impenetrable.
In sympathy to the cause, I forced my body to stay upright and vaguely conscious until he went off to send it.
* * *
—
I did not hear about Holmes’ day until Thursday morning, as we sat on our balcony watching the modern-day Canaletto come to life on the San Marco Basin before us. It was still reasonably early, and I’d soaked the residue of stiffness from my shoulders before the rattle of our breakfast tray roused me from the bath.
“I was too weary last night to ask about your day.” I concentrated on manoeuvring a large dollop of grapefruit marmalade onto a crescent roll.
“Unlike yours, mine was harder on the liver and lungs than on the muscles. I spent most of it at the Cole Porters’, in occasional musical interludes intruded upon by a constant tide of rich and titled visitors, American and European.”
I’d caught a whiff of his discarded clothing when I opened the wardrobe, its fabric ripe with cigarettes, strong drink, and—oddly—women’s perfume. “I hope for your sake the music was bearable.” I aimed the laden bread at my face.
“Much of it was not to my taste; however, it was eminently bearable.”