Pirate King (13 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

PIRATE KING:
I sink a few more ships, it’s true,
Than a well-bred monarch ought to do.

S
HE’D BEEN A
brigantine, once upon a time—from the Italian for
brigand
—and if this was love at first sight, love truly was blind.

She was a wreck.

No, she was worse than a wreck: A wreck would at least carry a faint trace of romance from the by-gone days and the glory that was sail.

Her name was
Harlequin
, and she was every bit the hotchpotch that name suggested. Granted, her lines had once been clean, but that was before she’d been converted into a fishing boat and given an engine and strewn about with lines and props and cabins and God-knows-what-all. An Arab mare with bobbed tail and denuded mane, daubed with spots and hitched to a rag-and-bone cart, wouldn’t have had her beauty more thoroughly hidden than this boat.

But Randolph Fflytte saw it. He saw instantly through twenty years of cart-horse behaviour, two decades of make-shift make-do, thousands of nautical miles of heavy-handed adaptations to her original lines, to the sleek, quick beauty she’d been when she danced down the rollers from her birth dock to slip demurely into the sea.

He stood on the dock and gazed across the intervening water at her, his face transformed. He looked inches taller. I would not have been too surprised if he had stepped off the chewed-up boards and trotted across the oily, debris-clogged water, just to touch her scaley hull.

“But we leave for Morocco in six days!” I protested. Geoffrey Hale and I were standing back, keeping an eye on Fflytte and Pessoa, two unlikely outlines side by side at the edge of the dock nearest the
Harlequin
. “We’d have to write whatever scenes he wants and rehearse them and then film them—assuming that boat doesn’t founder as soon as three people board it.”

“With any luck, it’ll go down before morning.” Hale sounded no more pleased at the prospect of arranging to film on this floating anachronism than I was. I opened my mouth to offer my services as amateur incendiarist, then reminded myself that revealing unlikely skills was not compatible to an undercover investigation. I changed what I had been about to say.

“Maybe he can shoot whatever scenes he has in mind while it’s at anchor? Draping sheets where the sails are supposed to be?”

My only answer was Hale’s slow sideways glance and raised eyebrow. I had to agree: With a reputation for realism (God, that word!) to protect, bed-sheets would not meet Fflytte’s standards.

With a sigh, I took out my note-pad. “What are we going to need?”

“Pessoa can find out,” Hale answered. “He’s the one who drew Randolph’s attention to the boat; he’s the one who can wade through fish guts to find the owner. By the time he’s finished, he’ll regret not hurrying us past that view-point.”

Hale looked sourly at the two men: Mr Pessoa looked remarkably pleased with himself, smug as any match-maker. It had not yet occurred to him that the racket he heard in the background was the sound of a spanner clanging against the finely tuned machinery of a film-crew.

I gave a brief laugh. “Will-the-Camera may murder him.”

“I’d hold the camera while he did so.” A veil of rain moved towards us across the water, the dock, and then our hats. Hale sighed. “I need a drink.”

Fflytte shook his head, scattering rain in a wide circle, when Hale told him it was time to go, and insisted on accompanying Pessoa on his search for the
Harlequin
’s owners. Only when Hale pointed out that having a wealthy foreigner along, openly mooning over the ship, would drive the hire price through the roof did the director allow himself to be pulled away.

At the dock’s end, Pessoa pulled together his lapels and walked off towards what I assumed were the harbour offices. Fflytte watched him go, then turned and give a last soulful look at the once-proud ship. From this angle, one could see that even her name was not original, that beneath the fading letters some previous incarnation strove to peep through.

Even slapping on a rough coat of paint was going to cost Fflytte Films a fortune.

We returned to the Avenida-Palace just before three o’clock, and although Hale pulled Fflytte towards the bar, I was very glad to see that tea was being served. I peeled away my damp overcoat and wrapped my hands around my cup, welcoming the obscuring steam on my spectacles.

I could write Holmes another letter, bringing him up to date on the entrance of a sailing vessel into our lives, but I had to admit, the investigation I’d been sent to carry out had been rather pushed onto a back burner. And Fflytte and Hale would be in and out of their rooms for the rest of the day, making trespass hazardous. Perhaps there was some stray member of the crew, abandoned here in the hotel, ready to spill the beans about Fflytte Films.

As if my thoughts had been a wish and my personal genie was sitting bored at my side, a familiar figure appeared at the door, a wizened, bow-legged man in rumpled tweeds and a soft cap. Will retained the looks of the Welsh farm-labourer he had been when he first wandered onto the Fflytte estate some forty years before, a sixteen-year-old orphan seeking work that didn’t involve a mine-shaft. Now, he was clearly looking for someone, but I stuck my hand in the air and waved in a gesture too energetic for him to ignore. With reluctance, he came in.

“Will-the-Camera,” I said. “We were just talking about you.”

Will was not one of your garrulous Welshmen. He merely glanced his question at the empty chairs.

“I’ve been out with Mr Fflytte and Mr Hale. Here, sit down. Like some tea? Waiter, another cup,” I called, ignoring the cameraman’s protestations that no, he really— “We just got back from a sight-seeing trip around the town with Mr Pessoa, and you’ll never guess what we found?”

“A rhinoceros?”

I paused, taken aback by this unexpected note of levity from a man who looked not in the least like he was making a joke. “Er, no. A ship. A very old and beat-up brigantine that Mr Fflytte decided is just the thing for a couple of scenes.”

Will dropped his head into his hand with a mutter that sounded like, “Jaizus.”

“I imagine you’ve been involved with any number of, well, challenging situations. Haven’t you worked with Fflytte Films for a long time?”

“Since before it was Fflytte Films,” he agreed. He scowled down at the cup I’d poured for him, doubtless wishing it might turn into something translucent and more fortified.

“Really? What was it then?”

“It was young Master Fflytte with a camera. Which he didn’t know how to work so he hunted me down on the estate and shoved it at me, told me to learn how to run it.”

“Well, you certainly did that. You’ve filmed almost all of his movies, haven’t you?”

“A fair number.”

“What a lot of stories your camera could tell! Were you there when the equipment went overboard?”

“I went overboard after it,” he replied.

“Good … heavens. The wave took you, too?”

“Nah, I jumped. Thought I might be able to save it, but it went down too fast. Left me with nothing but a tape-measure. Granted, my favourite tape-measure.”

Again, I couldn’t tell if this was laconic humour or mere fact. His expression gave no hint. He reminded me of a friend of my father’s, an older man who’d spent years around cowboy camp-fires in the West, mastering the art of the tall tale in a way my childhood self could only dimly appreciate, or even recognise.

“Well, that’s good, then,” I prattled cheerfully. “Have a biscuit? What about that short Mr Fflytte made during the War, filmed from an observation balloon? Was that you?”

“It was. Two years later we filmed in the trenches. Under fire. That one was never released.”

“Oh, for a peaceful life,” I commented. “But even after the War it doesn’t sound peaceable—wasn’t there one film where a polar bear went berserk?”

“Started as
Anna Karenina
. Shifted to
The North
. That got scrapped, too. I couldn’t look at the rug they made out of him for years. After that, I told Mr Fflytte I did not care to work with dangerous animals.”

“So when they made
Moonstone
, someone else worked the camera?”

“For the cobras, you mean? No,
Moonstone
was before the polar bear. But when I saw the script for
Hannibal
, in ’twenty-two, I said no thanks.”

“And yet here you are, working with thirteen girls.” He shot me a glance, decided I was joking, thought about that for a moment, and then sat back in his chair with a chuckle.

“You’re right. I must be mad.”

The point of my questions had not been the perils of making a Fflytte film, but to find out if the man had held a camera for Fflytte during the War years.
The Aeronaut
was made in 1915, and I knew that his proposed film
The Front
took place two and a half years later.

“It sounds as if you’ve handled Mr Fflytte’s cameras pretty much his entire career.”

“There’ve been two or three he had other operators for—I broke my hand just before
Krakatoa
. And there was a year when my wife was dying. Other than those, yes, it’s all Will Currie.”

I expressed condolences about his wife, and asked a question about the cameras, and film, and what problems he might anticipate, shooting on board the
Harlequin
. My curiosity about the technical side of his profession disarmed him, loosing his tongue a shade. I went on in that vein, sliding in the occasional investigatory question about the crew and cast, but taking care to keep the emphasis light, even when I asked about my predecessor, Lonnie Johns.

“What about her?” he asked.

“What was she like?”

“She’s what Daniel Marks might call a ‘good kid.’ Nice. Hard working. Not terribly quick in the wits. Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered why she’d left. Wondered maybe if she didn’t get along with someone.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know. Mrs Hatley, perhaps?”

Will snorted. I raised my eyebrows. When he did not explain his wordless comment, I probed a little. “Well, Mrs Hatley seems a bit on the formidable side. And she doesn’t appear always to get along with Mr Hale and Mr Fflytte.”

But that took things just a bit too far. He smiled, and said, “Yes, they’ve known each other a fair time now,” and reached for the watch on his chain.

I slipped in a last question. “I’m a little surprised Mr Fflytte hasn’t made a War movie, other than the balloon one. I mean The Great War—I know about the Boer film.”

He popped open his watch, giving an expression of mild alarm that suggested he’d forgotten he was looking for someone when I waylaid him. “Hale won’t have it,” he said, getting to his feet. “Made it clear when he was de-mobbed that any movie about the Front would be made without him. And Fflytte won’t work without Hale, so that’s it. Thanks for the tea, Miss Russell. And for the warning about the boat.”

He hurried out. I gathered my damp coat and, more slowly, my thoughts; and finally my instruments of writing.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PIRATES
[
springing up
]: Yes, we’re the pirates, so despair!

Sunday afternoon
Avenida-Palace

Dear Holmes,

I have just come from an informative conversation with William Currie, Fflytte’s long-time cameraman, a Welshman in his fifties who worked on the Fflytte estate as a young man, keeping its various engines running. A man who walks with a slight hitch to his step, who has carried a camera for Fflytte since 1902, including during the War years (which suggests that his limp predated 1914, and would explain why he was free to carry a camera instead of a rifle). In the course of our tête-à-tête, he filled in some missing pieces of information that I thought of interest.

I shall not trouble you with the minutiae of gossip, merely convey to you the following points:

1. Our “Ruth,” the woman known as Mrs Myrna Hatley, is also the mother and hence chaperone of the film’s daughter “June.” Mrs Hatley was herself in several Fflytte films, from 1907 to 1909, then did not act again until 1919. I mention her because there is a certain degree of delicacy when the others refer to her matrimonial state, and Will openly snorted: One suspects the lady did not submit to legal bonds. Her daughter (unlike two of the other “sisters”) has naturally blonde hair and bright blue eyes, and looks to be 14 or 15.
   
2. The first commercial film of Fflytte enterprises to star “Mrs Hatley” was Gay Paris, in 1909. Mrs Hatley would have been in her late twenties. Fflytte was 24, Hale 22 or -3.
   
3. Randolph Fflytte has dark hair and eyes and as I may have mentioned, is remarkably short. His right-hand man and second cousin, Geoffrey Hale, is tall, with tow hair and cornflower eyes.
   
4. On the ship here, while otherwise occupied, I overheard a small piece of tight-voiced conversation between Mr Hale and Mrs Hatley on the deck above me—rather, I heard her voice, while she was in conversation with him. The gist of her monologue was that although she appreciated the opportunity for employment, she could not but feel some resentment at being given the rôle of a middle-aged and unattractive harpy who is not only responsible for young Frederic’s mistaken apprenticeship to a band of brigands but on his reaching the age of twenty-one, attempts to trick the boy into marrying her. I did not hear Hale’s response, but the slap she dealt him as a consequence nearly sent him over the side. I thought at the time that he was making advances upon her, although why her, of all the women to hand.…
   

Regarding the other members of this travelling circus, our director has fallen in love with a sailboat, which I am led to understand will delay everything, drive his crew to distraction, and cost a small fortune. If no one else murders the man, his cousin may, since Hale is responsible for keeping the company financially sound.

(Have I told you about Geoffrey Hale, Holmes? Hale is a veteran of the Front, retaining the reactions, which saved his life [why does my hand feel driven to add, “once so far”?] following a misunderstanding during rehearsals. Hale is somewhat aloof from the others, although manifestly fond of Fflytte [their mothers are cousins (Hale’s father descends from the Hale of the Hale Commission [Wasn’t that Hale also involved in witchcraft trials? (I ask because I’ve been making notes for a monograph linking the repression of witches with that of modern suffragists.)])]—Where was I going with this? Oh yes: Hale’s lack of personal involvement with the others may be a combination of shyness and discomfort with his authority over them. It is not unknown, with officers who served on the Front, that they are unwilling to assert authority over any person, ever again.)

Our translator, Mr Pessoa, seemed mightily pleased with his rôle in introducing Fflytte to this decrepit ship,
Harlequin
. He does not yet grasp the amount of turmoil this introduction will entail, and I have no doubt that it will come as a surprise and a great disappointment to Pessoa (not only financially but personally, since the translator clearly relishes his involvement with piracy, even fictional piracy) when Hale invents good cause to fire him.

The necessary work of my position has made it difficult to move the investigation along at the speed I might wish—and then today’s potential snooping-time was given over to sight-seeing and mooning over a glorified fishing boat. It will not be possible to break into rooms until tomorrow, when rehearsals recommence, but I can see what little knots of actors are gathered here in the hotel, and see what golden titbits of gossip they can contribute to my hoard.

More later,
–R.