I woke to a faint sound. I remained face-down, vaguely trying to decide if I could ignore it or if I needed to leap into a posture of defence—and then Holmes, whose thoughts had clearly been running the same sleep-clogged track, identified the noise and rose.
It had been the whisper of an envelope slipped beneath our door. I patted the table for my spectacles, and sat up on the pillows to watch him walk across the room, ripping the flap of the telegram. He read the message without reaction, then handed it to me on his way to the desk telephone.
Mycroft had not bothered to put his reply in code, writing simply:
NAME IS THAT OF INCONVENIENT FIRST WIFE OF ITALIAN DUKE STOP YOUR LESSER ARISTOCRAT LEFT ENGLAND TWO DAYS BEFORE YOU DID STOP M
I read it a second time, my brain cells wrestling to attach the words to knowledge. At the third attempt, potential meaning took hold.
“Could he possibly mean the Dalser woman is Mussolini’s wife? That the President of Italy has locked up a woman in San Clemente?” I exclaimed.
“?‘Duke’ does translate Il Duce.” He spoke into the telephone: “Buongiorno, Signore. Vorrei il caffè, per favore. Si, per due. Si. Grazie.”
“Mussolini. Good Lord, if the papers get wind of this…No wonder a Capitano is willing to go out every day to make sure she’s still there! And by ‘lesser aristocrat’ I suppose he means the Marquess? If so, the man must have left England—oh heavens, barely forty-eight hours after I talked to Ronnie. It’s my fault, for not making it clear that she shouldn’t tell her mother.”
“True. Although it does serve to confirm the location of all the players in our game.”
“I’d have been just as glad to leave the Marquess out of it.”
“I trust that whatever costume you have for tonight, it will permit you to take your gun?”
He’d eyed the boxes that our costumes had been delivered in, but not enquired further. I grinned. “Oh, yes.”
Coffee, breakfast, newspapers, food, and our toilettes took up the remainder of the afternoon. When Holmes came out of the bath, rubbing the towel on his jet-black hair, he stopped dead, glowering at the garments lying across the bed. For him, the Porters’ invitation had said: Come as a hero. For me, Elsa’s instructions were: Come as your true self.
“What is that?”
“Your costume, Holmes. Surely you know Zorro? Douglas Fairbanks? No? Never mind, put on some eye makeup and you’ll look perfect—and you can hide behind the hat if you need to. You’ll also find it a lot easier to play the violin in those than in some of the costumes the shop had on offer.”
His gaze travelled to the other set of clothing. “That looks like a man’s suit.”
“It is. But not just any man.” I put on the flesh-coloured half-mask attached to a pair of spectacles, over-sized circles I’d scoured the city to find—and which I’d then had fitted with actual, ground lenses, paying a small fortune to have them done overnight. Seeing no recognition dawn, I added the straw hat, then an expression of bland stupefaction. “Harold Lloyd? That’s all right, Holmes, everyone else will recognise it.”
It took some convincing for him to don the voluminous pirate’s blouse of heavy blue-black silk, the snug trousers, and the rakish scarlet sash that tied around his waist like a lopsided bustle. The hat was not exactly right, its brim being a touch too narrow, but he set his foot down at the red kerchief. “Russell, that is something Mrs Hudson would wear for attacking the cobwebs.”
“Well, I suppose you can just keep the hat on. And that moustache you’ve grown is close enough. Let’s see if we need to make adjustments to the mask.” Doing so cost him some hair, when he attempted to pull off what I’d tied snugly in place, but the eye-holes were sufficient. More or less.
“You might want to push the mask out of the way before you go down any flights of stairs, Holmes,” I suggested. “Especially if you’re wearing this.”
With a flourish, I pulled the pièce de résistance from its scabbard, slicing the bed-cover as I did so. I looked down in dismay. “Oh, dear. When I told the man to clean it up, I didn’t mean to sharpen it as well.”
My ageing Zorro came around the bed to gingerly take both rapier and scabbard. In his hand, the grip seemed to nestle into place, the length of shiny steel looking more like an actual weapon than a film prop. He tried it out in the air, quick flicks of the wrist that caused the metal to sing as it had not for me. “This is not a bad piece,” he said in surprise.
“No? Well, just make sure you don’t leave it lying about. Some drunken idiot could disembowel someone with it.”
When he was dressed for the night, his eyes darkened and hair sleeked back, he looked extraordinarily—yes—dashing. The only incongruity was the violin case. Knowing Holmes, once the instrument was tucked under his chin, it would seem a natural part of the Mexican hero’s costume.
I, on the other hand, looked like somebody who only had to walk past a house to have it fall on him, who would straighten up just as a beam swung past, who would walk out his door in a new white suit and bump into a child with a chocolate ice-cream cone…I gave the looking glass a smile of vacuous innocence, and ambled away towards the vaporetto.
Chapter Forty-two
HOLMES WALKED DOWN THE RIVA Degli Schiavoni and through the Piazza San Marco. He wore the Spanish don’s flat-brimmed hat, although the mask was tucked in the scarlet cummerbund—masks on public streets had been outlawed during the War, anonymity being seen as an invitation to crime, and there was no sign that the Fascists were good-humoured enough to lift the ban. A tourist might get away with nothing more than a stern warning, but an obscured face still attracted the kind of attention he did not at the moment wish. If the police were to stop him for the infraction, they would surely notice that the sword he wore was real. They might even go on to find the gun.
Better to invite the humour of passers-by and look like a damnable motion-picture player. Even the police didn’t take a middle-aged Zorro seriously—especially one carrying a violin case.
On he walked, across bridges, through the Piazza, winding through calli and fondamente and campi to the Grand Canal, where he paid double to have the traghetto cross the busy waterway trasversale, to drop him on the Ca’ Rezzonico steps.
The festivities would not get under way for another hour, but the palazzo was humming with activity—hanging up lanterns, mounting torches, taking delivery of trays and boxes. Six swarthy gentlemen, none under six feet tall and all with superbly defined muscles, stood ready to receive guests arriving by water. All six appeared to have climbed from their beds with their sheets clutched around them, although as Holmes drew nearer, he decided their dress was intended to be a sort of toga.
The night’s theme was “Come as a Hero,” but if these were intended to be gladiators, they were missing their swords.
“Seite romani?” he asked the large man who hauled him onto the mossy steps.
“Sorry, mate?”
Not Roman: Australian. “I was asking if you were meant to be ancient Romans?”
The man looked down at his skimpy cotton folds and the hairy knees below. “The lady said we was s’posed to be Greek.”
Ah: the brief garment was meant to be a Greek chiton, pinned at one shoulder. “Very handsome,” Holmes told him.
The large man tugged at the skirts, clearly uncomfortable with the fact that he was standing a good foot above the eye levels of the approaching guests. A gust of wind would be revealing.
Abruptly, the six men betrayed a shared military past by snapping to attention and all but clicking their rope sandals together. Holmes turned to find Cole’s wife, Linda, in the doorway, her beautiful face wearing a professional smile. She was wrapped in a silken dressing-gown, makeup on but hair still pinned: either she was to be a hero of the boudoir, or she had yet to finish her own preparations. “Mr Russell, there you are—Cole was wondering if you were going to be late.”
Linda ran the household with an iron hand: being late, he had been informed early on, was a mortal sin that condemned a man to the eternal punishment of being removed from the Porter guest lists.