Pirate King (8 page)

Pessoa, on the other hand, took a hefty swallow from what appeared to be a light port, and looked satisfied.

“So, is he here, your man?” Fflytte asked.

“I haven’t asked. It is always best to blend in a little before asking questions.”

I blinked: How long would it take before a young blonde woman nearly six feet tall, an Englishman wearing an Eton tie and a vicuña overcoat, and a midget in white sealskin would blend in here?

“Er, perhaps we shouldn’t wait for that,” I suggested. “Could you just ask him now?”

Pessoa finished his drink and carried his empty glass back to the bar. My eyes having adjusted somewhat to the gloom, I noticed that two customers stood there, slack-jawed.

I couldn’t blame them a bit.

Fflytte gingerly lifted the object out of his drink, examined it, then allowed it to slip back under the murky liquid. Pessoa launched into conversation with the barkeep while the man refilled his glass. The customers soon chimed in. A tiny, wizened woman with a scarf around her hair poked out from a set of curtains at the back. The Portuguese conversation, as always, sounded furious to the edge of violence, but I had already learnt to suppress the urge to draw my knife, and indeed, the shaken fingers seemed mostly to be pointed at the walls rather than into the face of an opponent. Still, agreement seemed either to be unreachable, or not to the point. Eventually I stood up and approached the bar with my note-case in my hand.

Nodding and commenting all the while, yet another cigarette dangling from his mouth, Pessoa plucked the money-purse from my hand and pawed through the dirty bills, dropping a remarkably small amount of money on the bar. He handed me back the case and drained the glass (his third?) as the consultation wended its way to a close. I blew a gobbet of ash from the remaining bills, and we went out into the night.

“They have not seen him today,” Pessoa informed us, and walked off down the street.

We repeated the ritual at four more establishments, each smaller and dimmer than the last. Fflytte abandoned any thought of a cocktail after the second version, one sip of which had him coughing and pale. Hale and I, too, gave up on our initial choices and settled for port, which seemed harder to ruin by maltreatment. Pessoa was the only one who polished off his drink each time; the man had a heartier constitution than first appeared.

The fifth bar was so small, even Fflytte looked oversized, and the rest of us ducked our heads like Alice after the growing cake. It was getting on to eleven o’clock; I had not slept a full night since leaving London; I had not eaten a full meal in that same time. I was exhausted and cold and so hungry that the plate of fly-specked objects on a shelf (pies? boiled eggs? bundled stockings, perhaps?) made my mouth water. Hale looked far from hearty. Fflytte’s air of determination had gone a touch grim. Only Pessoa remained undaunted. He looked no more fatigued than he had when I met him on the quay-side half a day earlier.

We ordered the requisite drinks. Pessoa took a swallow and reached for his packet of cigarettes, then addressed the saloonkeep with the question that, following repetition, I could understand. “Have you seen La Rocha?”

Each time before, the query had set off a lengthy back-and-forth of identification: Which La Rocha? The old man with the scar (Pessoa inevitably drew his finger down the left side of his face at this point). The barman (or in one case, -woman) would narrow his (or her) eyes in concentration, at which point a customer (there were never more than three) would speak up from where the bar was supporting him (always a him) and suggest some further characteristic—a quick swipe at the chin to ask if it was the La Rocha with a beard, a pass of the hand over the hat to indicate baldness, once a thumb shoving the nose to indicate a distortion of that protuberance—and Pessoa would generally shake his head and go on with further verbal description of his man.

This time, however, the barman pursed his mouth to indicate understanding, then jerked his chin up to point at a spot behind Pessoa. All four of us swivelled to look: The wall had a hole in it, concealed behind a hanging heap of garments so large and so permanent in appearance, I would not have been surprised to find a Moorish burnoose at its base. When we turned back to thank the man, he was standing with his hand around the neck of a bottle. It was unlike any bottle I had seen that evening—indeed, unlike any I had seen for a very long time.

Dark rum, from Cuba, very old. The vessel had the air of a king before peasants. The way the barman’s hand clasped its shoulders made a clear statement: The rum was the price of being permitted through that door.

I retrieved my note-case. This time Pessoa by-passed the small denominations (the
escudo
was worth so little, coins had all but disappeared from use) and thumbed a 100
escudo
note into view. The bottle retreated a quarter of an inch on the sticky wood; a second such note came up behind the other. A third note edged up before the man’s hand slid the bottle forward and accepted the 300
escudos
.

Pessoa reached for the expensive tipple, but my hand intercepted the glass neck first. I thrust the bottle at Fflytte. “I think we’re seeing our man now,” I told the movie mogul. “This appears to be your gift to him for the honour of an audience.”

On the one hand, Randolph Fflytte was not a man to beg an audience, especially in a place like this. However, I was betting that the whole rigmarole would appeal to his dramatic sensibility, and so it proved. He studied the petrified cobwebs for a moment, then hefted the rum and lifted his eyes to Pessoa. “Lead on,” he commanded.

It was something of a relief to see that Fflytte wasn’t idiotic enough to go first through a dark passageway with a pirate at the end of it—even a would-be, fictional pirate. Pessoa did not look quite so phlegmatic. For the first time, it occurred to me that our
cicerone
perhaps might not know this La Rocha as well as he had given out.

We went through single-file: Pessoa, Fflytte, and me, with Hale bringing up the rear. Only Fflytte could walk straight-spined, and as we approached the end of the brief passageway, the upturned nape of my neck tingled with vulnerability.

However, we stepped into the open room without a scimitar removing any heads from shoulders, then fanned out to examine our surroundings—but in truth, it was only later that the details of the room itself were recalled to mind, its generous proportions in relation to the outer room, the ancient wood and rich colours, three age-dark paintings, and an ornate carved door in the back, glimpsed through a pair of heavy curtains. The room faded into unimportance, compared to the two men it contained.

One stood, although there was an empty chair—an impressive figure, well over six feet tall and hard with muscle despite his grey hair, a man with watchful eyes, weathered skin, and an air of private pleasures. Still, it was the seated man in front of him who instantly caught, and held, our attention.

The old chair in which this man sat became a throne, his royal hands cupping the arm-ends, his enormous, once-red boots planted like trees on the rich carpeting. Seated, his head was below our eye level—even Fflytte’s—but it felt as if he were towering above us on a raised dais.

His eyes were black, his skin was leather, and the grey in his hair was iron rather than age. A gold ring glinted from the shadows beneath his ear. The man had to be in his sixties, although he could as easily have been ten, even twenty years older. He occupied the chair like an ageless crag of rock on which countless ships had gone to their doom.

Fflytte recovered first.

He stepped forward, to set the expensive bottle on the table before the fire. “My name is Randolph Fflytte,” he said. “I’m here to make a movie about piracy.”

He stopped: concise, dignified, and with a sure grasp of the dramatic. Pessoa cleared his throat. “
O Senhor disse
—” he began, head inclined as if he were addressing the Pope. Only to be cut short by a dismissive twitch from La Rocha’s fingers.

“I unnerstan’ English,” the man said—or rather, squeaked.

At least three of us felt an urge to giggle at the unlikely sound coming from such an impressive figure, but the urge fled before it entered the room, killed instantly by the shocking sight of the scar that came into view as he shifted. It had been a terrible wound, beginning just in front of his left ear and following his jaw-line to the larynx. It looked as if his head had been detached; the blade must have come within a hair’s breadth of severing any number of vital vessels. That he could speak at all was a miracle.

Even Fflytte gulped in reaction, but again, he recovered first. He walked across to the empty chair, hesitating briefly with his buttocks hovering, a silent request for permission. La Rocha’s eyes gave a slow blink; Fflytte gathered his ridiculous coat around him and sat. Hale took up a position behind the director, forming a mirror image with the pair on the other side of the table. Pessoa and I stayed on either side of the entrance like two eunuchs guarding a harem, the translator clasping his hat in both hands, intent on the seated man.

La Rocha lifted one hand, palm up. The man at his shoulder placed two small glasses in it. He set them down on the table, wrenched the cork from the ancient neck with his brown teeth, and filled both glasses to the brim.

Fflytte picked up his glass, took a swallow, set it down again, and leant forward to gaze into the other man’s face. “I need a pirate,” he stated. “A pirate king. I think you’re my man.”

CHAPTER TEN

SERGEANT
: … we should have thought of that before we joined the Force.

I
T WAS NEAR
two in the morning before we left the pirates’ den and stepped into a rain-drenched alleyway slick with grime. When we entered the door of the Avenida-Palace, Pessoa might as well have been dropped into the Rio Tejo, Hale’s vicuña coat would never be the same, and Fflytte resembled a drowned white puppy. My shoulders were clammy beneath my normally efficient rain-coat; my shoes squelched. Wordlessly, the two Englishmen slithered across the lobby towards the lift. I turned to Pessoa.

“I shall see you in the morning. Perhaps Mr La Rocha will come up with some more likely pirates.”

“One can but hope,” he agreed. With some effort, he retrieved his near-flat packet of cigarettes, looked mournfully at their state of damp collapse, and inserted them back into the pocket. With a brief tug at his hat-brim (sending a dribble of water to the floor) he took his leave and went back out into the night.

I enjoyed a deep, hot bath, then crawled into a bed that neither tossed nor rolled beneath me, and slept for many hours.

Rested, warm, and clean, I descended the next morning with a bounce in my step, buoyed by the anticipation of a breakfast that would remain
in situ
. My benevolent mood lasted until the first sip of coffee.

My hand jerked at the shriek that tore through the hotel restaurant; coffee shot over my table and my person, the gentleman at the next table contributed a juicy expression to my Portuguese vocabulary, and one of the waiters dropped his tray. Simultaneously mopping my clothes and searching the vicinity for the source of the harpy’s scream, I soon found it, and the day disintegrated around my feet.

The thirteen daughters of the Major-General formed, as I said, a stepping-stair of curly blonde heads. Their height-determined names had been assigned that first hour on the steamer: “Annie,” “Bonnie,” and “Celeste” were the picture’s nineteen-year-olds; “Doris,” “Edith,” and “Fannie” played seventeen-year-olds; “Ginger,” “Harriet,” and “Isabel” sixteen; and “June,” “Kate,” and “Linda” assigned the age of fifteen. Mabel, the eighteen-year-old lead, was out of place in the arrangement, being a middle daughter in the opera.

In truth, half of the girls were in their twenties—even Mabel (Bibi) admitted to twenty-six, and I suspected the woman playing Annie was nearing thirty—where the others’ heights did not match their ages: middle sister “Fannie” looked the youngest of all, although as I got to know her better I decided that her wide-eyed simplicity was acute stupidity; sister number five, “Edith,” had a tom-boy personality that made her seem less than the fourteen years her mother claimed for her, and a world younger than the seventeen her height had automatically assigned her; “Linda,” on the other hand, was eighteen, but so tiny she had no problem playing the youngest sister (although her growing bitterness at being treated like a child—by attractive young men, most of all—was already threatening to incise frownlines on her diminutive features).

(Oddly, considering his passion for realism, Randolph Fflytte did not bother to explain a family with four sets of triplets. And it goes without saying that
The Pirates of Penzance
, even with its lesser chorus of daughters, has no rôle for the heroic mother responsible for producing them. Neither did our own
Pirate King.
)

It was tom-boy “Edith” who had proved a problem from the beginning, first because she had shown up on the docks at Southampton half an inch taller than when Hale had hired her three weeks earlier, and second because she was such a handful. If Isabel or June (ages “sixteen” and “fifteen”; actually fifteen and fourteen) discovered a fish-head between the sheets of her bed one night, it was sure to be Edith who had been spotted sneaking away from the galley with a bundled newspaper. If Doris’ hair-comb was mysteriously coated with honey, Edith would be discovered with sticky fingers. She was one of the actresses who had come with mother in tow (or in the case of “fifteen”- [fourteen] year-old “Kate,” an elder sister) but the maternal person could do little to keep Edith under control.

For some reason, on board the steamer from England, Edith had forged something of a tie with me, despite my spending most of the time in solitary contemplation of the waves. Unlike the other girls, who came looking for me when they had a complaint and otherwise regarded me as beyond the pale (my sensible shoes, no doubt), Edith seemed actively to seek my company. Why the child should regard me as a kindred spirit, I could not think. Certainly any vague affection for me did not stand in the way of her trouble-making.

All of which meant that when a youthful shriek split the peaceful coffee-and-toast-scented air of the hotel, one’s immediate thoughts went to Edith.

I stood, pressing the linen to my damp thigh as I went in search of the catastrophe. Sitting on the floor before the closed lift door was June (who, although fourteen, at the moment looked more like eleven) with one hand clapped to the side of her head. I hurried to kneel next to her, examining her fingers for signs of seeping blood.

“June, what happened?”

She shook her head vigorously, letting her hand slip a little—still no gore.

“June, let me see. What’s wrong?”

She bent over, shaking her head so quickly that some hair ripped free—but no, that was unlikely. I reached down to peel her fingers away. With them came an alarming quantity of hair. She began to weep.

With her hand off, I could see a shilling-sized patch where someone had taken a pair of scissors to her pretty head. “June, who did this to you?” I demanded.

She squeezed her lips together to keep any revelation from escaping. Good Lord, I thought: extortion among the adolescents.

“Was it Edith?” I asked.

At that, the child scrambled to her feet and confronted me, her face pink with fury. “My name is
not
June!
I’m
Annie, not Annie!”

Oh, heavens. “I know that, dear, but we have another Annie because silly Mr Hale wanted to give you all nick-names. Surely it wasn’t Annie who did that to your hair?”

Annie—that is, “Annie,” the “oldest” and I thought probably oldest—did have a butter-wouldn’t-melt look that rode on her peaches-and-cream English features and made one overlook her nosey-parker habits until she turned up in one’s state-room. Still, she’d never demonstrated open aggression towards the younger girls.

June turned and fled for the stairs. I looked down at the sad drift of pale curls, and got to my feet. If I wasn’t quick, the day would be upon me before I had a chance to snag any breakfast at all.

June’s mother found me at the same moment my egg did. Manners might have demanded that I put aside the meal, but I had a suspicion that if I were to pause for every interruption, I would starve. Instead I hunched over my plate to shovel in fuel while the woman stormed and fumed and demanded that I assemble all the sisters this instant.

“Did June tell you who did it?” I mumbled around a full mouth.

“It could be any of them. They’re all jealous of my Annie’s hair—she’s a real blonde, I hope you know, unlike some of the others.”

And unlike Annie/June’s mother herself. “Yes, your daughter has lovely hair, and I’m sure we can comb it so the cut patch doesn’t show on camera. Maybe she could wear a hat.”

“Why would she wear a hat? It would hide her pretty hair!”

“Or maybe pin on some kind of ornament? Honestly, Mrs, er—” What was this woman’s name, anyway? She was there both as chaperone and to play the part of our nursemaid, Ruth, and acted as if she ruled not only the crew but the principals, judging by her conversation with Hale that I’d half-overheard on the steamer that day, just before the wind blew off her—ah: “—
Hatley
, it will be easy to conceal, I’m quite certain. I’ll talk to Mr Fflytte about it.”

The director’s name served generally as an anodyne to affront, and I had come to make shameless use of it to reduce various irate actresses, mothers, or sisters to cooing females. Mrs Hatley was of harder stuff, being a veteran in the world of films and having known the director for years, but even she melted a degree under the warmth of his name. “Would you? I hate to bother him with this, but truly, my baby is quite upset. If Mr Fflytte has a word with the others, to tell them how tender her sensibilities are …”

If Mr Fflytte did, I thought, every one of them would instantly turn on June and peck her to shreds. “I’m sure he’ll make it right,” I promised, holding her eyes in all earnestness while my hand surreptitiously snaked out to claim another triangle of toast. “Perhaps you should go make sure your daughter is all right?”

It took several repetitions of the suggestion before the woman grudgingly withdrew, and I was free to press shavings of hard butter into the cold toast and glue them down with a very tasty marmalade. I scraped the side of my fork on the plate to get the last of the egg yolk, and felt the next interruption standing at my elbow.

“Hello, Bibi,” I said—no need to look up for purposes of identification, not for a person accompanied by smacking lips and the odour of mint.

“Hello, darling, have you seen Daniel?” she demanded.

Where is Daniel?

“Mr Marks? No, I’ve only been down here for—”

“He
swore
he’d be down here, he
insisted
that we had to work on a scene, although
really
it’s a
rotten
hour, I must look absolutely
hell.
” She paused for me to deliver a stout rebuttal of the devastation of her looks, but I merely chewed my toast and turned on her a pair of bovine eyes. Bibi glared. “I mean, it’s all very well for people like you to be dragged out of bed at an ungodly hour, but it’s just not a part of my
régime
, don’t you know? Daniel
said
to be here so here I am, only he’s done a bunk, and I can’t
think
where he’s got to.”

I stopped chewing. “ ‘People like me.’ ”

“Oh, I don’t mean …” she said, although clearly she did mean. She waved her manicured fingers to indicate my appearance, but had just enough sense to grasp that she stood on the edge of danger. Instead, she stamped her little foot and half turned away, looking, if not for Daniel Marks, at least for someone with the authority to produce him. Without further word, she wandered off.

My appetite seemed to have wandered away, too. I dropped the remains on my plate, swallowed the last of my coffee, and went to see what other disaster awaited me.

I got twenty feet when it dropped on me. Rather,
he
dropped on me.

Major-General Stanley (or Harold Scott, the actor playing the Major-General—Hale’s habit of calling the actor by the rôle was contagious) came across the lobby on the shoulders of a pair of uniformed hotel employees. I exclaimed and stepped forward, but again, there was a singular absence of blood. Except in the whites of the good gentleman’s eyes—and then the smell hit me, and I halted.

The Major-General, however, shook off his supporters to stagger in my direction, weaving from side to side as if he’d just come off the ship. “My dear Miss Russell!” he exclaimed. “How superb to see you. Come and have a drink with me.”

I dodged his grasp, saw him begin to overbalance, and stepped back inside his stinking embrace to keep him from falling. He beamed happily into my face for a moment, then frowned. His eyes took on a faraway look, and I wrenched myself out from under—there are things the job of film assistant most emphatically does not cover. Fortunately for the Major-General, the two young men reached him before he hit the floor. Unfortunately for them, they were not as quick in the techniques of avoidance as I.

I left them exclaiming in disgust as they more or less carried the now-reeking Yorkshireman towards his room, while a platoon of mop-wielders took up formation behind them.

I cast a despairing glance at my wrist-watch: It was not yet nine o’clock in the morning. We had been in Lisbon just under twenty-four hours.