THE FRANCOLETTI PALAZZO, LIKE MOST of its type, had two entrances, the one on the water being its more ornate and ceremonial. As Holmes walked past the workaday back doors onto the campo, he noticed that they stood open, revealing a housemaid scrubbing the aged tiles of the ground-floor portego. He continued into the campo, vexed—as he generally was in this most uncooperative of cities—by the choice of exits on which to keep watch: water landings and terrestrial doorways were invariably on a building’s opposite sides. However, in this case, the campo’s end (as his map had suggested) was open onto the waterway. A motor-launch stood at the palazzo’s landing, with a liveried attendant to suggest a possible imminent departure.
To his pleasure, there was even a caffè convenient to his task of keeping watch, which provided not only a view of the canal and a tiny jolt of espresso, but the previous day’s Messaggero as well.
He settled to the headlines: Amundsen’s North Pole flight crews had, against all expectations, survived, dropping out of the sky in Norway; the Fascist Party Congress was claiming many triumphs in Rome; the Geneva Protocol now prohibited the use of weapons such as tear gas. Before his cup was empty, the palazzo’s door came open and discharged three men wearing the black of the Milizia. One stepped casually into the waiting motor-boat, the other two were less confident. Strangers to Venice.
The launch—which had either come in from the other direction, or been laboriously backed along the narrow waterway—started up. As it passed the fondamenta on which the tables had been set out, Holmes raised the paper and listened with care. The Venetian native was speaking excellent English, but slowly. One of his companions—the one leaning towards him with a frown—was less fluent in the language.
“—will be most impressed with what we are building on Marghera. We will be able to bring in the very biggest ships, and Venice will become…”
As the boat negotiated a turn in the canal, sunlight fell upon the object of Francoletti’s lecture: a burly and distinctly English face, paying avid attention to claims of a grand future.
The Marquess of Selwick. The Fascists will be looking for those in power that they might infect.
Such as an ambitious and impatient aristocrat, sympathetic to the Fascist cause, who has reason to come to the Fascist homeland. Naturally, he gets in touch with the local authorities to help locate his sister. But if, once there, he is met by a powerful and like-minded colleague? If the two men look at each other and see enormous potential?
Then Mycroft’s prediction becomes correct: Fascism gains a foothold in England.
There was little point in racing to hire a boat and follow the men: they would be gone for the rest of the day. Holmes finished his coffee and the newspaper, thumbed a coin into the saucer, then walked off through the by-ways in the direction of Ca’ Rezzonico.
The house was just waking, but Holmes was amused to find that “practicing for Saturday night” had almost immediately been swept aside in favour of, “Say, what do you think of this?” Holmes began to realise that, at home in Paris, where he spoke the language, Porter had a whole community of musicians to call upon. Here in Venice, if he wanted company at the piano, he had to make do with a near-to-elderly amateur violinist.
For in the Porter household, “company” was paramount. Cole Porter did not let his musical hobbies get in the way of his social life. And yet Holmes could see that a portion of the man’s brain worked even as he drank and laughed with his unending stream of visitors—and while he slept, probably. The man seemed to spin words and music as a peasant woman spun her thread: at all spare moments, in all circumstances, without appearing to be aware of it as labour.
Take Holmes’ jocular agreement, on their previous meeting, to a suggested afternoon of irresponsibility. “Let us misbehave,” Holmes had said, and instantly regretted the phrase, less for its sentiment than for its jarring discord with the personality he was putting forth.
Neither Porter nor his wife seemed to notice, which was all to the good—and he had taken greater care to act the easily amused elder statesman at the luncheon and musical afternoon that followed. But clearly the phrase had stuck in the man’s ear and, over the past twenty-two hours, been harvested, cleaned, combed, and was now in the process of being spun into thread.
The stilted suggestion was now an informal encouragement: “Let’s Misbehave.” Of course, the saucy lyrics that followed would never find a publisher, much less a stage anywhere in the vicinity of Broadway or the West End, but it was a rough first attempt, and Holmes suspected that Porter would keep tinkering with it until he had a song whose language would pass in mixed company, even if its sentiments would bring a blush to the cheeks of a sexagenarian detective.
(And what might the man do with a song based on the Latin numbers—quart, quint, sex, sept…)
Holmes caught himself, cleared his throat, and said, “Now, as to your guests tomorrow night: I would imagine that some of them might find the tunes of the 1890s more familiar than those of last year’s, er, ‘hits’?”
Chapter Thirty-seven
MY MORNING DRAGGED, NO EASIER on this side of the lagoon than the other. I dawdled, I bathed, I tried to read, I drummed my fingers, and I finally took the Excelsior’s launch over to the Lido.
Where I dawdled, drummed my fingers some more, and finally went for a long walk down the island and back up again.
Upon my return, about a third of the cabanas were occupied, including that of Elsa Maxwell.
“Hello there, darlin’,” she greeted me. “You’re up and about early.”
“Oh, I don’t sleep a lot.”
“I know the problem, dearie. Have a drink.”
“Thanks, maybe some coffee. I don’t suppose you’ve seen Terry yet?”
“Oh, we probably won’t see him for a while; he went off with somebody pretty last night.”
Not, I thought, a girl. I hid my deep sigh and asked the hovering attendant for an espresso, settling in for another useless day among the lotus eaters.
But shortly after midday, a most unexpected sight came marching down the row of cabanas: a young man’s legs in a swimming costume, the upper part of him hidden behind a pair of long Alpine skis balanced across his shoulders. Elsa’s cabana fell silent. Her film star turned to see what had caught our attention. Soon, all eyes were on the approaching figure. The legs came to a halt; the long wooden objects swung down to rest on the sand. It was the Hon Terrence, my admiring boatman, grinning hugely.
I wondered if he might require a nice calm rest period amongst the San Servolo lunatics.
Elsa spoke first. “Terry, dear, you’re a few hundred miles and a whole lot of clothing away from using those things.”
“No, dear thing, I ordered these ’specially. Have you any idea how hard it is to buy a pair of skis in the summer? I heard about this American who’s skiing on water. Just tie a rope to the boat and hold on, and Bob’s your uncle.”
“Sounds like a great way to break your neck,” Elsa commented, but not everyone was of the same opinion. In two minutes flat, Terry was headed towards his speed-boat with three other handsome young men, none of whom was named Bongo. The women around me watched the mass retreat, sighing.
“Such a pity,” one of the girls murmured, and returned to her sun-worship.
Thus the afternoon was enlivened by the sight of Terry’s speed-boat practicing brief bursts of speed just beyond the swimmers—very brief bursts of speed, for the most part. One time a figure managed to stay upright for nearly three triumphal seconds before shooting head over heels into a great gout of water, and the big engine cut again.
After an hour and a half of abortive and no doubt cumulatively painful efforts, the sleek boat turned for shore, tying up at the splendid Excelsior pier that stretched out into the sea. The four men walked down the boards and up the beach, three of them rubbing aching shoulders, all of them looking glum.
Their welcome was none too sympathetic. What, had they thought that since snow was water, skis would work on the wet kind, too? And had anyone actually seen this American alleged to have done it? Well, walking on water had always been something of a miracle. Maybe they’d start selling floating boots so people could walk over to San Marco instead of waiting for a vaporetto.
And so on.