“No, Signorina. More like un culto.”
“A cult? Like, Naturists? Or Spiritualists?”
“Folle, tutti quanti.”
“Credulone? O pazzi?” Did he mean the man’s followers were foolish? Or insane?
“Both, I think, Signorina. But not friendly.”
“I see. Thank you.”
He nodded and faded back into the other passengers, rather than risk having to talk further about it.
Had it been a new lunatic asylum under construction, or even a health resort, I might have looked more closely, but I could not imagine Lady Vivian coming under the influence of a religious charlatan while she was in Bedlam. And although it could conceivably have been Nurse Trevisan’s doing, I could not fit the idea of that nurse’s calm and sensible demeanour into a community of religious dupes.
For the moment, I would file Poveglia under “Possible But Unlikely.”
Chapter Thirty-three
TO HOLMES’ IRRITATION, THERE WAS a marked lack of piano music and laughter coming from the windows of Ca’ Rezzonico as his traghetto plied across the Grand Canal. At the entrance, the servant who came to the door confirmed that, yes, Signor and Signora Porter had left for the day, gone to Murano with Signor and Signora Murphy and some other friends, or possibly Burano since the Signore and Signora had not decided and they wished to send both glass and lace home with the friends, and possibly they did not know the difference between the two islands—but in any case, mi dispiace molto but they are not here. What, the Signore wishes to come in and use the music room in the absence of Signor Porter?
But of course—this way, Signor Russell.
The maid’s attitude being, If this English fellow wants to steal the silver, well, those mad Americans can afford it.
When he left two hours later, Holmes carried away not silver, but something of greater interest: a copy of Linda’s guest list.
Chapter Thirty-four
BY THE TIME I REACHED the main Lido stop, it was well after noon. I paused in the Excelsior to change my clothing, and on the beach found some dedicated partygoers only now edging towards consciousness. Others had been out on their padded chaises for hours, either under the candy-striped awnings or baking their well-oiled skin in the open. Attendants scurried about with drinks and ices, a few children played in the surf (nowhere near as many as in the public areas), and people in swimming costumes danced to gramophone music out on the floating dock-island. Desultory talk flitted back and forth across the sand.
Need I say, it was the talk I was after, rather than ices and sun?
However, I did begin with a swim—walking all the way down to the water before I shed the garish pyjamas, diving rapidly in before anyone could focus on the scars visible around the edges of my costume.
I was a strong swimmer, well practiced with Holmes along the rugged shingle beach near our home in Sussex. This water, though open sea rather than lagoon, was calmer than ours, and warm. I swam past the dancing couples and turned to follow the line of the beach: half an hour down, then slightly more back again.
Pleasantly tired, I waded out and flung my towel around me—again, quickly, before curious eyes could focus—then walked back up the beach.
A voice from one of the shadowed huts called my name. I veered aside, greeting my friends from Tuesday night. “Hullo, Elsa. Good afternoon, Miss Fellowes-Gordon.”
Her companion—I had not yet been asked to call her Dickie, so I used her mouthful of a double-barrelled surname—gave me a languid nod, and Elsa patted a chair. “Honey, you must need a drink after all that exercise.”
“Sounds lovely, but first I need to rinse off the salt. You planning on being here for a while?”
“Nothing doing until dinner, so sure.”
I bestowed an absent-minded smile—the sort that indicates vague friendship without an exact recollection of names—on those gathered around her, and went to find a shower-bath. As I walked away, it occurred to me that Elsa was the exception to the beach’s class structure—that she and Dickie should have been located in a cabana nearer the water. Was this because she had more personal magnetism than money? Or was it by choice—that she wished to be nearer the cross-roads of action?
It was probably both.
When I was clean and cool, I returned to my good friend Elsa and settled onto the chaise she indicated. I told her pet attendant what I’d have to drink and eat, and exchanged greetings with her various actresses, politicians, aristocrats, and the simply wealthy. Then I faded into the scenery, listening to conversation. I picked up some titbits about Elsa’s past and her plans for the autumn. I paid attention to a brief exchange about the local Fascists, listening to whose voice held approval and whose doubt. I asked about interesting night-clubs in Venice, and noted the names—but the consensus was that Venice had none, and the Lido’s best was right here.
Someone mentioned Cole Porter. His name brought knowing chuckles and some affectionate remarks, although one of the girls did not much care for his wife, Linda. I murmured that I’d heard she and Porter both had their side-interests, hoping that the idea of Linda Porter as a lesbian might give me some direction to follow, but no one pounced on it. Two of the younger women, mutually anointing their skins with cocoanut oil, were speculating about the necessity of aiming the sides of their bodies towards the sun, or whether the sun reached down the curvature of the limb to do its work, because it would be dreadful to have a tan that was not uniform.
“Someone needs to invent a sort of human rotisserie,” I commented. “Slowly spinning a person around and around.”
This caught the imagination of about half the people there—those who weren’t asleep or reading a novel—and soon the suggested invention had been expanded to include an automatic misting of oil and the regular raising of drinks—attached to long straws, one of them suggested, so as not to disturb the continuity. But when this progressed to its logical conclusion—what did the rotisseried human do when the drinks caught up with the bladder?—the eruption of giggles and guffaws startled our fellow beach-goers.
I smiled benignly, having established myself as a Good Sport and a Clever Girl, and stretched out an arm for my glass.
That Thursday afternoon and evening with the Lido set went much like Tuesday’s: the smells of salt air and cocoanut oil and perspiration, the sun beating down, nothing on the schedule except food, drink, flirtation, and endless talk about nothing at all. I could see why everyone drank so much. How else to bear the monotony of gossip, card-playing, and magazine-reading? How else push aside the suspicion that a responsible adult did not while away entire days playing games or paddling in the water and pushing servants around?
I should leave, I thought. I’m finding precisely nothing about Vivian Beaconsfield.
But if she had come to Venice, wouldn’t she show up in this group, sooner or later? This was what she had enjoyed, in her Season: not the serious business of finding a mate, but the colour and buzz, the silliness and whirl, the dancing and the masks.
One more day here. If I’d heard nothing by tonight, that was it: I’d have more luck scouring the coffee-houses on the Giudecca.
So I lay, surrounded by marchesas, principes, Ladies, and Sirs who drank Prosecco and champagne, nibbled lemon ices and hunks of watermelon, and discussed matters no more pressing than the dinner menu. These were people who could put together a revolution—and certainly bankroll one—yet here they lolled with no more purpose than a beach-full of sea lions.
Perhaps, I wondered as the Excelsior’s shadow crept with infinite slowness across the sand, the fault is mine? Maybe after so long running flat out, I’d forgot how to relax. Holmes and I had been on the road and on the case for…well, years now, and any muscle so long tensed takes time to stop its clenching.
Perhaps my twitching boredom with the titled and the rich was the mental equivalent of a cramp
in an overworked muscle? If so, my fretting was not going to reduce the cramp any. Instead, give the muscle—or the mind—some form of exercise, however pointless.
So, with little better to do, in between casting delicate hints about small, blonde Englishwomen and taller, black-haired women with moles on their necks, I devoted the remainder of the day to perfecting my persona, stretched upon my divan with the other lords of the realm. The Miss Russell I’d begun with was something of a cipher; she now edged into outright mystery: interested in those around her, but oddly aloof. Widely travelled, but not in these circles. A person more apt to be polite to a bar-man than to a baronet. Who understood even the most suggestive of double-entendres, but seemed to find them…disappointing? True wit caught her imagination, but the ersatz left her untouched.
Was I wealthy? And how. Educated? No doubt. Was I a prig, a prude, or a bluestocking? Absolutely not. But was I hetero-, homo-, or non-sexual? Hmm: now there was a question.
In between listening hard for any trace of Vivian Beaconsfield, and dropping oblique remarks into various conversations, I set out to vamp the Lido crowd. I did not aim for Elsa Maxwell herself—too obvious, and fortunately, I didn’t appear to be her “type.” Instead, I took some care in turning the attention of others back onto her, subtly but regularly.
The result was an invitation to dinner, informal and private, with Miss Fellowes-Gordon-oh-please-call-me-Dickie and a handful of others—including, I was delighted to see, my young man from the other night, the Hon Terry, who’d spent the day with chums in the town.
I claimed the chair beside him, ruthlessly elbowing aside a daughter of Count Volpi. On my other side was a remarkably brown young Tory MP who (as the evening went on) proved to be great friends with Winston Churchill and more or less married to a duke’s more or less daughter. That is, they were married but he spent his life straying, and his wife bore a striking resemblance to the duchess’ paramour.
Introductions made, I turned back to Terry with a question about the upcoming masked ball—which theme, I had been told, was, “Come as your true self.”
“Tell me, is Elsa’s ‘do’ on Saturday night actually a ball?”
“No, that’s just what the old girl’s calling it. There’ll be a band and dancing and food, of course, but—well, now that I think of it, I guess that does make it a ball. You are coming, what?”
“I haven’t been invited.”
“Invited—hah! Elsa!” The American looked up from her conversation with a white-haired woman I’d seen in a cabana so high in status, it nearly touched the water. “Haven’t you invited Miss Russell here to the bash on Saturday?”
“Of course I have, honey. She’s one of my intimate friends, why wouldn’t she come?” And with a twinkle, she turned back to the old lady.
“So, Terry, what’s your ‘true self’—what costume are you wearing?”
“Oh, mustn’t tell. That’s what the masks are for, to keep people guessing.”
“The costume balls I’ve been to, it was pretty easy to see who people are.”
“Sure, sometimes. Depends on the mask, of course. Mine—well, you won’t have much of a problem. But sometimes between the mask and the paint and the feathers, it’s hard going. And of course, there’s always a few newcomers, so just when one is about to say, ‘I know you!’—one looks down the line and sees the person one thought one was talking to.”
“I’d imagine Elsa would be pretty hard to disguise.”
He chuckled. “She’d need a pretty substantial costume, that’s true. And for you, it’ll be tough to hide your height. Like the girl who came last week—only the other way ’round, of course.”
“Who was that?”
“Dunno. We called her ‘Cinderella’ ’cause she disappeared around midnight. Itsy slip of a thing. Pale hair, pinky mask, said almost nothing, danced all night—then poof! She was gone.”
Good Lord: I’d endured an entire day baking on the beach and here, all along…Terry frowned. “Er, did I say something wrong?”
“Oh, sorry, no. I was just…reminded of a thing. That I have to do tomorrow. Sorry. But about this Cinderella girl. She sounds like someone I know—I don’t suppose she had a companion? Tallish, darker? Has a mole on her jaw?”
“Well, there was a fella she danced with a lot, he had a mole—he didn’t say much, either, but not a bad mover.”
“Did you by any chance see which way they went, after they left? I mean to say, they’re not staying at the Excelsior?”
“I didn’t, no. But you might ask Bongo—he was madly taken with her, moped around for days when he couldn’t find out who she was.”
“Bongo…?”
“James is his name. James Farquart-Sitherleigh. Big fellow, small head?”
“I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“He’s around—maybe not today, he had something going in town.”
“Might ‘Bongo’ be back tonight?”
“Anything’s possible.”
After an interminable meal, punctuated by the MP’s hand on my right knee (Why did I keep expecting Holmes to walk in the door?) and Terry’s blithering about American sports in my left ear, we adjourned to Chez Vous. There, I found many of the same faces, a few new ones—but not, unfortunately, that of James-Bongo Farquart-Sitherleigh. As the night wore on, alcohol flowed, music pounded, and drugs made their appearance, discreet at first and then less so. It became harder to shake off intrusive hands on the dance floor, as daytime flirtations became the more urgent decisions of the night.
It was exhausting. And when a mass exodus occurred halfway through the night—a slow time for the Chez Vous band coincided with the rumour of an American Negro jazz band at the Grand Hôtel des Bains down the way—I started off with the rush, only to gratefully duck away.
My head spinning, my face aching with hours of smiles, I stumped tiredly across the island. There I found my faithful gondolieri, as requested many hours before, waiting and ready. I let Carlo wrap me with a travelling rug, not even contemplating its potential for fleas. We pushed into the dark, quiet waters, and flew, pulled by the city’s lights and two men’s expertise and eagerness. As we went, I found myself humming low, When daylight is fading, Enwrapt in night’s shading, With soft serenading, We sing them to sleep…
Giuseppe and Marco—no, those were the operetta: Giovanni and Carlo—slid into place before the Beau Rivage. They walked me across the wide quay to the hotel door, tipping their hats to me and murmuring that I should pay them tomorrow, tomorrow.
So grateful was I for their silence and their skill—and so firmly planted in my freestyle Lido persona (also, yes, maybe a little drunk)—that I nearly kissed them both, right there on the hotel steps. Fortunately, I caught back the impulse in time. Not only would they have quit instantly, but the night manager would have had my bags packed and in the lobby before morning.
Chapter Thirty-five
FRIDAY DAWNED.
Little point in rushing over to the Lido before noon, since my chances of finding Terry’s friend with the idiotic pet name that early were minuscule. Instead, I settled down to another morning of a warm tile balcony, another view of a living Canaletto, another breakfast of bread and jam. One could get used to this, I supposed.
Again, I gave Holmes a distilled version of the previous day: sun, drink, boredom, and a quick and fleeting glance of what might be Vivian Beaconsfield, in the guise of Cinderella. “I hope to find this Bongo fellow today. And you? What news from the Fascist front?”
The moment I said it, I heard the echo of a boot in flesh, that inhuman mewl of pain. “Oh, God, Holmes, I’m sorry—the attitude of the Lido set seems to be contagious. I meant to say: did you find out anything about the Porters’ guest list?”
“No need to apologise, Russell, I of all people can understand the dangers of a prolonged act. Yes, I did see it, under t
he nose of the servants.”
“Anything interesting?”
In response, he dug in his pocket, dropping a quarter-folded sheet of expensive writing paper on the table. I put down my cup and undid it, finding it covered top to bottom with his pinched scrawl: names, scores of them. Nearly all of them with check-marks by their sides.
“Good heavens, Holmes. You looked into all these people in one afternoon?”
“And evening. I had assistance.”
“Your waterborne Irregulars?”
“And a variety of garrulous shop-keepers, fishmongers, butchers, and delivery boys.”
I placed the sheet down on the table. “Well, you certainly had a more productive day than I did. Any conclusions to be drawn?”
“Your Elsa Maxwell may be disappointed to lose some of her prizes to the Porters this week. There were many names whose importance lies in their titles: the director of La Fenice opera house, the director of the Biennale international art exhibitions, the director of the…”
I waved away a wasp buzzing the jam-pot, wondering when Holmes would reach the point of his recitation.
“…including three Francolettis.”
A glance at the list confirmed my memory, that the very last name on it was just that. Holmes reached out to refresh his coffee, forcing me to ask. “Very well: who are the Francolettis?”
“Francoletti is an old Venetian family. As with many such, over the centuries their fortunes receded, and one by one they sold all of the important holdings that generations of marriage and acquisition had brought in all over the country—leaving the Francolettis with a mouldering palazzo, a venerable name, and a handful of worthless properties, including a stretch of swamp on the nearby mainland. Their sons were educated and scattered to the humiliation of earning a living. The palazzo slipped into further disrepair. And then, shortly after the War, Count Giuseppe Volpi looked at precisely that swath of worthless land on which to build a new deep-water port, a project aimed at transforming the economy of the entire Veneto district. The Francoletti palazzo is no longer in disrepair, and the family are on their way to becoming extremely wealthy indeed. The third brother’s name is Renato. He is fluent in English and has recently been brought back to Venice, having lived in Rome most of his adult life.”
Island of the Mad Page 21
