I realised that both Holmes and I were studying the third photograph, the one showing Cole Porter’s full face.
“He looks like a man who’s just won a hard-fought game of tennis,” I remarked.
“A hard-fought battle in a war, more like.”
It was true: Porter did not look as if he’d been playing a game. Or if a game, it was an important one. “I’m glad we could make it worth his while. Although I hope there aren’t too many repercussions—from the Italian government, I mean. Did you have much trouble talking him into wearing the dress, Holmes?”
“Porter, no. His wife took longer to convince. She’s extremely protective. On the other hand, she likes to make him happy, and she could see how badly he wanted this. Men such as Porter put up with a lifetime of snubs and insults. He’s learned to take his revenge indirectly—through a third party, say, or by means of clever and convoluted jokes hidden inside his songs. Not many people notice the sharp edge behind the fluff. In any event, Linda let herself be convinced that playing along would make her a ‘good sport’—because it also meant the two of them could extract a revenge on the Capitano, through his all-important British guest, for the open contempt he’d shown them both.”
I picked up the fourth picture again, the one that showed mostly the table and the crowd of dancers pausing, mid-flail, to watch. Porter’s face was blurred, little more than grinning teeth, but the camera had caught a slice of Linda’s face. This was a woman who’d married a homosexual—knowing what he was—and who had just watched him give a man a hard kiss on the mouth. Yet there was no anger there, no hurt. What I saw there was distinctly pleasure—not arousal, but…yes: pride.
I imagined that Mrs Porter, too, experienced few victories in her married life. The insulation of riches could go only so far.
As for the Marquess, there was no mistaking him, either: dressed as a Fascist, in the full and affectionate embrace of a transvestite man. The Italian Fascists’ disapproval of homosexuals was in fact relatively low-key, and Cole Porter himself could certainly laugh the picture off as a bit of fun at a fancy-dress party—but the Marquess? For Edward, Lord Selwick, evidence that the pictures had survived would come as a shock—and a threat. Proclaim his innocence as he might, these photos would end his political dreams. The British establishment might overlook homosexual behaviour—might even practice it—but it could never forgive a man who’d permitted himself to be made a laughing-stock in the papers, caught in flagrante by the light of a photographer’s flash.
As we’d left Chez Vous, film in hand, we had heard the two men arguing. The Marquess was insisting that, yes, it truly had been his sister that night outside of Ca’ Rezzonico—after all, it could not have been Porter, now, could it? But the outraged Capitano was not open to argument. The outraged Capitano was barely open to English, swearing in a furious mix of languages that his new “friend”—the word was accompanied by the exact Pah! spitting gesture my two gondoliers used—had thrown him into a position of ridicule, public ridicule! That he’d be lucky not to be demoted to patrolling the Alps! Imagine, starting a brawl—in the Excelsior, of all places! Filled with Americans and English and French and— (The words that followed were unintelligible and probably Venetian.) Now the foreigners would all be writing home to say they’d been threatened—by the Milizia! What if they all decided to pack their bags and stay away, go to the Riviera next year instead? What would Il Duce say about that, eh? Venice was his showcase, and did the Marquess know how much the Excelsior alone brought in every year? As far as the Capitano was concerned, the Marquess could board the first train out, and take his disruption home with him. (Pah!) Italia was very fine without the help of England, thank you very much.
I smiled, there in my suite in the Beau Rivage, as I picked up the two photographs. One look at these, and the Capitano would be chasing after the Marquess’ train with a rifle.
“You know, Holmes,” I said as I slid the two prints into an envelope, “I never realised how satisfying blackmail could be.”
Chapter Forty-nine
SHERLOCK HOLMES WATCHED THE TWO crisp images disappear into the envelope, but he was thinking about the conundrum of Mr Cole Porter.
Holmes had gone to Poveglia himself on Monday morning, in a boat he’d had to buy outright from its enterprising owner. He’d brought away a parcel: the golden dress and bandeau Lady Vivian wore to the Lido. That afternoon, it had sat on the littered pietra dura table while Cole chatted and played, with Linda, the Murphys, several cats, and various friends coming in and out. But when Linda went off to check on lunch and the various friends went to see about a drink, Holmes had laid the parcel, and his proposition, before the composer.
First he described the situation—or as much of it as he cared to disclose: a desperate woman choosing freedom; her brother wishing to control her money, her sexual preferences, and her person; the brother’s vulnerabilities, both here and at home.
What they required was a short man willing to wear women’s clothing to a dress-up party. A golden costume, extreme and feminine. It had to convince—
“Sure,” Porter said, reaching out to pick up the feathered bandeau. “Unless we can’t get the dress to fit me.”
“I’m told it is relatively voluminous.”
“Fine, then.” He dropped the bandeau and traded it for his cigarettes. “That’s assuming I won’t be the only guy in a dress. Linda won’t like it if I am.”
“As I understand it, the night is to be something of a free-for-all. Men in dresses, women in suits, women who prefer trousers donning frills, men who, well…”
“Lavender boys dressing butch?”
“As it were. The basic idea being, anything goes.”
“Fine with me.” Porter returned to the keyboard, his clever hands bouncing through the chords he’d been improvising earlier. It was a jaunty tune, the sort of thing a man would hum walking down the street. “Looking for some words for this one,” he said. “Maybe your mixed-up costume party will give me an idea.”
“One never knows,” Holmes agreed. In this new world, wasn’t anything possible? A curmudgeonly old detective could marry a girl half his age; a man could speak his painful truths from beneath a mask of light-hearted jokes; an island of madwomen could hide in plain sight.
Anything goes.
Author’s Notes
1925 proved too early for the rise of Fascism in Britain. It was not ushered in until Oswald Mosley rose in the thirties. However, the impulse was already building, as witnessed by the founding of a proto-Fascist organization by Rotha Beryl Lintorn-Orman (described by Mycroft Holmes herein).
Women in 1925 Italy were regarded as being primarily a means of building the population of the state. Women were forbidden various kinds of jobs, including teaching history, Italian literature, and Greek or Latin in the high schools.
Ida Dalser, who claimed to have been married to Benito Mussolini in 1914, bore him a son in 1915. She persisted in demanding her rights, although any paperwork disappeared after the Fascist government took hold, and she was put into the San Clemente asylum in 1925. Their young son was told she was dead, although she lived until 1937. When the boy later asserted that his father was Benito Mussolini, he, too, was committed to an asylum, near Milan. He was murdered there at the age of twenty-six, in 1942.