Pirate King (9 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SAMUEL:
Permit me, I’ll explain in two words:
we propose to marry your daughters.

MAJOR-GENERAL:
Dear me!

T
HE PAVEMENTS OF
Lisbon were a sea of cream-coloured stones with patterns picked out in black. The streets of Lisbon range from mildly sloping to positively vertiginous. The stones are invariably worn smooth. That morning, I wore shoes I’d purchased in London after Hale’s unwitting snub to my fashion sense—the sturdy pair I had worn the night before were steaming on the radiator.

Two steps outside the hotel door, my feet went out from under me. I was saved by the ready hand of a doorman, who was probably stationed there for that express purpose. After that I went more cautiously until I discovered that a sort of ice-skating gait best kept me upright. Other pedestrians seemed not to have a problem. Perhaps it was these shoes?

I skated along the rain-slick Avenida da Liberdade for a while, barely glancing at the fine boulevard with its statues, fountains, plantings, and black-and-cream mosaic pavement. Electric trams clattered past, Lisboans skipped merrily up the glassy footways, and I reached the remembered kink in the road before my foot came down on a sodden leaf and I went down again, this time catching myself on a lamp-post. After that, I tottered. A tiny, hunched-back, ninety-year-old woman with a walking stick tapped briskly past. Two chattering women bustled past balancing baskets of fish on their heads; one of them was barefoot.

The Maria Vitória theatre evicting us in the afternoons required that we get an early start in the morning. I expected that I would be the first one there, since I’d already got the clear impression that Lisbon’s clock was two or three hours canted from that of London: Here, 10:00 p.m. made for an early dinner.

To my surprise, the outer doors were unlocked and I could hear voices. I shook the rain from my coat and hat, following the sound.

Three hats occupied the centre of the second row of seats, looking like the set-up for some Vaudeville jest: The one on the left barely cleared the seat-back; that in the middle was exaggeratedly wide and battered even in outline; the one sticking up on the right bore the perfect shape of the best in British haberdashery.

Fflytte on the left, Hale on the right, and between them La Rocha. All three were intent on the man occupying the stage.

In the seat behind La Rocha, straight-backed and hatless, sat Fernando Pessoa.

I draped my outer garments on the seat at the beginning of the row and sidled along to sit next to our translator. He gave me an uncertain smile before returning his attention to the conversation in front of him which, although it was in English, gave indications that it might require his services at any moment.

“No,” Hale was saying, “we only need twelve pirates.”

“Have more,” La Rocha’s incongruous high-pitched voice urged. “I have many.”

Fflytte, his eyes on the stage, said in a distracted manner, “We only have thirteen daughters.”

La Rocha stared down at the small man. Then he turned to his lieutenant from the previous evening, whose big figure was planted on the edge of the stage.
“Treze filhas! É mais homen que parece.”

Pessoa’s back went straighter and his mouth came open as he prepared to spring into action, but he paused at the pressure of my hand on his sleeve.

“There may be a slight misunderstanding,” I suggested: La Rocha’s meaning had been clear in his tone of voice, if not his words, and I did not think relations would be improved by a translation of “He’s more of a man than he looks.” I leant forward to explain. “
Mr Fflytte
does not have thirteen daughters. There are thirteen girls in the
story.
”

The pirate king craned back to look at me, then again at Fflytte. “
Entendo
. Thirteen girls. And they need ’usbands, yes? Then thirteen
piratas.
”

“Just twelve,” Fflytte insisted. “Mabel is already taken by Frederic.”

Hale spoke up. “Frederic is the apprentice pirate.”

“ ’Prentice? What is this? ’Prentice?”

“
O aprendiz de pirata
,” Pessoa contributed.

The black eyes swept each of us in turn, silently, before La Rocha showed me his back and returned his gaze to the stage.
“Aprendiz,”
I heard him mutter.
“De pirata.”

The current would-be pirate on the stage resumed the monologue from his printed sheet, but I found it hard to pay him any attention, distracted as I was by the man ahead of me.

I rather wished I had come in by the other door, which would have put me on Pessoa’s right: At this angle, my view was entirely dominated by La Rocha’s terrible scar. Temple to larynx, the thing must have spanned ten inches. The heavy red-gold earring winking above it made for an eccentric contrast. Why didn’t the man grow a beard to conceal the injury? One’s own throat went taut, seeing that shiny raised track.

“No,” Fflytte said, sounding as if he had been contemplating some profundity. “The colour’s wrong.”

“Clothes can be changed,” La Rocha declared.

“Not the clothing, the skin.”

“This, too, can be changed.”

“No, he’s just too light. These are Barbary pirates. This man looks Swedish.”

It was an exaggeration, but not by much. The other men trying out for the parts of pirates were swarthy, hard-looking men with nicely photogenic moustaches or beards, but the person currently at stage centre would have looked more at home in a European counting-house than as a high-seas privateer. He wore elderly but well-polished shoes, his shoulders were stooped, and his hair was not only thinning, but a most unthreatening light brown colour. His facial hair consisted of an apologetic line above his lip.

“He’s just not … swashbuckling enough,” Fflytte said. La Rocha cocked his ear back, and Pessoa struggled for synonyms.

“Er,
romântico. Exôtico?
Swashbuckling.”

“Ah.
Swashbuckling
. He can swashbuckle.”

“I really don’t think so,” Fflytte said. “He looks like my book-keeper, Bertram, who’s the least exotic person I know.”

“Next,” Hale called.

“No!” The syllable echoed through the empty theatre like a crack in glass; the entire theatre stopped dead. The balding Swedish accountant looked near to fainting. I fought an impulse to leap for the aisle. Hale, veteran of the trenches, appeared to be wrestling the same urge.

Fflytte, on the other hand, turned to peer up at the source of the countermand, frowning in disbelief. “Mr. La Rocha, are you making this picture, or am I?”

I had thought the silence profound before; now one could have heard a hair settle on the floor. The cracked pane trembled, preparing to shatter in an explosion of deadly shards—until La Rocha looked back at the stage.

“Go,” he squeaked. The accountant fled. Fflytte sat back in his seat. The rest of us drew breath. Hale settled more slowly, but within a few minutes he, too, was wrapped up again in the casting process. Pessoa’s shoulders gave a motion that was halfway between a shrug and a shiver, as if to shake off an idea he could neither justify nor account for.

It took somewhat longer for the hair on the nape of my neck to go down. Something large and dangerous had flitted through the theatre. I did not know who or what La Rocha was, but the man’s potential for violence had snarled at us, just for a moment. That he had so easily shut it away again was perhaps the most unsettling part of all: Having this man play the pirate king was like hiring a lion to play a tabby.

I studied his scar, and was struck by the image of the man standing before his looking-glass each morning holding a razor to his face, deftly manoeuvring its keen blade around that obstacle, touching weapon to scar …

That was why he went clean-shaven—and why he wore a loop of gold that attracted the eye: He wanted people to notice the scar. Wanted them to see it, and to consider the man who had survived that injury, and to be afraid.

Well short of mid-day, Fflytte and Hale had eliminated three men too ancient (even in this post-War era) to marry a Major-General’s young daughters, a couple of others too ugly, one with a disconcerting facial spasm, and another with a mouth that refused to shut. In the end, they settled on fourteen men, allowing for two extras. These were all friends or associates of La Rocha. None had any experience with the stage. Two were mere boys, one of them so young he carried a pet mouse in his pocket. Some were willing, others sullen, a few treated the enterprise as a huge joke, but they would all make believable pirates, and they all obeyed La Rocha. Of course, if Fflytte’s pirate king decided to quit, the picture would go up in smoke, but that was hardly my problem.

Today there would be no matinée, so the theatre belonged to Fflytte Films until six o’clock. Hale dismissed the unwanted actor-pirates, handing them each a day’s pay to make up for their rejection, while Pessoa translated Hale’s words and I began to fetch chairs from backstage. Fflytte wanted them set in a circle, although I did not get the chance to carry even one since the pirates instantly seized it from me. By dint of dragging my insistent helpers across the stage and using emphatic hand gestures, I got the chairs assembled in only twice the time it would have taken me to shift them myself.

When Pessoa and Hale had finished with the others and the doors were closed behind them, Fflytte pulled a break into the circle and told Pessoa, “Have them sit down.”

The instructions were passed on, and the men and boys (after a glance at La Rocha for permission) drifted into the circle, each taking up position before a chair. Hale sat. La Rocha and his right-hand man sat. The others looked at me; they remained standing.

Fflytte took no notice. “Miss Russell, we’ll be working here for the rest of the afternoon. See what you can do about bringing in some sandwiches or something, would you?”

“Right away?”

“One o’clock would be fine. Now, sit, you men.”

Fourteen large rough figures hovered over their chairs as if waiting for the gramophone needle to drop. I snorted as I turned away, but the image of piratical musical chairs kept a smile on my face until the pavement nearly had me on my backside. After that I concentrated on my feet.

I made it to the hotel without mishap and told the maître d’ what I required. He stared at me blankly, although that morning, he had spoken a quite serviceable English.

“Sandwiches,” I repeated. “For twenty.”

“These are English men?”

“What does it matter? They’re men, they need to eat.”

“This is lunch?”

“That’s right. In an hour, if you please.”

“Sandwiches.”

What was wrong with the fellow? “Yes. Sandwiches. For twenty. In an hour. And some drinks—I suppose most of them would like a beer. I’ll also need someone to help me carry everything,” I added, just imagining myself trying to negotiate the paving stones with a load of glass bottles.

“Very well,” he said dubiously, pulling a small tablet out of his pocket and writing a few words. He went away, frowning at the message, but I had no interest in pursuing the minor mystery.

I only had an hour in which to burgle my employer’s rooms.

CHAPTER TWELVE

PIRATES:
Let’s vary piracee
With a little burglaree!

O
N THE STEAMER
out from London, in the calmer intervals when my head and stomach were not spinning, I had tried to get a sense of which members of the cast and crew were permanent fixtures, and thus conceivably linked to any criminality that Fflytte Films might be trailing behind it. Fflytte and Hale, of course, were omnipresent, but I had been surprised at just how many of the others were long-time employees.

From cameraman to costumer, at least a dozen members of Fflytte Films had consistently worked together for five years or more. Another twenty individuals had come and gone in various projects. Sister two, “Bonnie,” had acted in half a dozen Fflytte films over the years—although one would never know it by the way Fflytte and Hale treated her, which was with the same mild lack of interest that they used to address any of the girls. Mrs Hatley, whose daughter “June” was the victim of an involuntary hair-cut, had herself acted in four or five Fflytte productions, including one so early, it was before Fflytte Films actually existed. Daniel Marks’ first Fflytte production was the 1919
Quarterdeck
, and since then he had appeared in five others, in various hair colours and styles, with facial hair or clean-shaven, peering through spectacles or not.

The only people I had eliminated for certain were Bibi, who had worked in America for the past few years, and the six of her “sisters” who were under eighteen: Surely I could omit children from my list of suspects?

I had compiled a rough list of those whose careers spanned the years that troubled Lestrade, but before I investigated the shell-shocked camera assistant and the petite redheaded Irish lass whose needle produced costumes ranging from Elizabethan collars to beggars’ weeds, I wanted to eliminate the two men in the best position to manipulate the company. By breaking into their rooms.

In my experience, hotels generally count on the presence of doormen and desk personnel to repel potential burglars. All one need do is become a guest of the hotel, and defences are breached.

My choice of targets was a toss of the coin: Hale, or Fflytte? Granted, I could not envision Fflytte wasting any energy on an enterprise not directly connected with the making of films; on the other hand, I could well imagine our director simply not taking into account that the laws of nations applied to him, so why not dispose of the drugs or guns that one had assembled for the purpose of a
realistic
(damn the word!) film by selling them? I might imagine Hale involved in a surreptitious criminal second career, but he must surely be aware of the consequences were it to be uncovered—and in any event, why then encourage a newly hired assistant to watch for untoward activities?

It might help to know if Lonnie Johns, the missing secretary, had been located yet. Back in Lestrade’s office, the woman’s unexplained absence had a sinister flavour, but the longer I lived in her shoes, as it were, the more sensible a tear-soaked flight to a Mediterranean beach or the Scottish highlands sounded.

My choice was made by the hotel’s cleaning staff: As I came out of the lift, they were coming out of Hale’s room. I walked around the corner, waiting for them to disappear into Fflytte’s room next door.

They went in—and they came out rapidly, moving backwards, blushing and apologising and making haste to get the door shut between them and whatever had startled them. Or rather, whomever. Three middle-aged Catholic ladies stood in the hallway, given over to a shared gale of stifled laughter, then scuttled down the corridor to the next room. Where they knocked loudly before letting themselves in.

When no one popped instantly from the director’s room, I sidled down the corridor and applied myself to the latch. Less than thirty seconds’ work put me inside Hale’s suite. I took off my shoes to pad silently through the four rooms, checking for a sleeping guest or a particularly diligent cleaner, but all I found were the sitting room, a bedroom, a second bedroom from which the furniture had been stripped, and a bathroom with fittings considerably more elaborate than those in my room on the floor below. No missing secretary stuffed into a traveling-trunk; no packets of unsold cocaine in the sock-drawer. Yes, there was a small hand-gun in the bedside table, but I had no way of knowing where it had come from.

In the suite’s second bedroom, the bed and dressing table had been replaced with a desk, a laden drinks cabinet, four comfortable chairs—and a small mountain of wooden file cabinets, which I had last seen going out the door of the Covent Garden office. They were held shut with locks. I laid my shoes on the desk, and got to work.

Because Fflytte Films spent so much of the year in locations around the globe, Hale was in the habit of carrying his office with him. The file cabinets bore labels, 1 through 12, and as I’d expected, the last two bristled with details concerning
Pirate King
, while the files in the first were concerned with early films. I started with 3, looking for the year of Lestrade’s earliest suspicions.

I quickly realised two things. First of all, these files were not complete—which made sense, because trailing every scrap of paper around the world would make for cumbersome travel indeed. And second, that even with the condensed files of the earlier drawers, my search would take me a lot more than the hour at hand.

Take
Small Arms
. The picture was three years old and Hale still carried around a dozen folders concerning its making; several were about the personnel (mostly actors, type-written pages annotated by Hale and Fflytte); four covered technical matters. (Film used; problems encountered; letters from cinema-house managers; carbon copies of letters to cinema-house managers—most of these were complaints over the speed at which they had run the film; and one long, furious, epithet-dotted complaint from Will-the-Camera over the impossibility of working with small children who are supposed to lie dead but keep smirking and giggling and peer into raw film canisters and ruin a day’s shooting and burst into tears whenever an adult shouts at them, with a strongly worded postscript asking that he be given a budget for laudanum. It did not specify whether the drug was for himself or for the young actors.) One file contained distribution records; another held details on the sites used; and the slimmest of all had chaotic notes on the history of
Small Arms
, in Fflytte’s hand, which looked to have been made with an eye to an eventual autobiography.

No receipt for the illicit sale of a large number of revolvers.

I put the last
Small Arms
folder into place and reached for
Hannibal
, but before I could get tucked into a lamentation on working with elephants, the sound of a key hitting the door had me slapping the drawer shut and leaping for the desk.

Hale walked in to find me with a shoe in one hand and a corkscrew in the other. I jumped, nicking the ball of my thumb and dropping the implement.

“Ow!” I gasped, and stuck the wound into my mouth. “Heavens, you startled me!”

“What are you doing in my rooms?” he demanded.

“Fixing my shoes.” I pulled out the thumb, looked at it, and shook it in a demonstration of pain.

“No, I mean—” He looked down at my oozing wound, then at the shoe. “What’s wrong with your shoes?”

“Their soles. Haven’t you noticed how deadly those pavements are?”

I directed his gaze to the sprinkling of tiny black divots lying on his blotter. He frowned. “But why are you here?”

I checked the scratch, which had already stopped bleeding, and retrieved the tool to bend over the sole again. “I know, you didn’t give me a key, but I didn’t know the Portuguese words for
knife
or
wood rasp
or
corkscrew
, and I knew you’d at least have one of those, so I came up to see if maybe you’d followed me back and I found the cleaning crew just leaving—” I looked up, feigning alarm. “Please don’t tell on them. They’d lose their jobs and they’re such nice ladies, and they’d seen us talking downstairs so they knew I worked for you.”

One advantage of not really wishing to do a job is that it becomes easier to risk losing it. If Hale fired me, I should be free to take the next steamer home, where with any luck I would find Mycroft gone. Better, I could set off on a nice, terrestrial train, and spend a few days in Paris. However, Hale responded more to my attitude than my words—not that he liked having his rooms broken into, but he could see the shoes and had no particular reason to accuse me of criminal trespass. His ruffled feathers subsided.

“You hurt your hand.”

“Just a scratch,” I said. “Better than a broken leg.”

“Those pavements are a bit hazardous, aren’t they?”

I looked up from my task. “I’ve ordered a pile of sandwiches. Was there something you forgot?”

Hale cast a last glance at the proclaimed reason for my invasion of his rooms, and dismissed it from his mind. “Yes, I didn’t bring the sketches and I thought they might help those imbecile pirates understand what we’re doing.”

“They’re not much as actors, are they?”

“They’re not much as human beings. But there’s no denying, they have the look of the sea about them, and that’s what Randolph wants.”

He went over to the second
Pirate King
cabinet, opened it with the key, and drew out a file so thick, its string tie barely held it shut. He shoved the drawer closed with his foot, pocketed the key, then straightened, looking dubiously at me.

“I’ll leave,” I offered, “but may I borrow your corkscrew?”

“That’s all right, just lock the door when you go.”

And he left me there with his secrets—any of his secrets that might lie in the cabinets.

However, I merely finished gouging some holes in the shoes, locked the cabinet I had broken into, and left.

I didn’t really expect to find him standing outside the door, but I didn’t think I should take the chance.

In the dining room, the picnic meal and a young man to carry it were awaiting me. On the pavement, the tread I had carved into the soles of my shoes improved my traction. In the theatre, the actors were still in their circle, the colour sketches spread at their feet. At the interruption, Pessoa looked grateful for the respite in translating six simultaneous conversations. After instructions, the hotel employee handed around the sandwiches and beer. Upon finishing, the pirates looked content. And at the stroke of 1:30, all sixteen pirates got to their feet and paraded out, to the consternation of the two Englishmen.

“Wait!” Fflytte exclaimed. “Where are they going?”

“To lunch, of course,” Pessoa answered.

“But that’s what the sandwiches were for!”

The poet looked up from buttoning his coat, his eyebrows raised in disapproval. “For a Portuguese man, a sandwich is not a lunch,” he said with dignity, and walked down the theatre aisle after his countrymen.