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.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MABEL: It’s true that he has gone astray.
THE AFTERNOON WAS somewhat truncated, since our pirates did not reappear until 3:00 and we had to be out of the Maria Vitória at 6:00. In addition, they’d had a somewhat liquid luncheon – and moreover, had brought the alcoholic portion of the meal back with them, since at least four of them paused every so often to swallow from small bottles.
By five their boisterous shouts were rattling the lights, and Fflytte hastily cancelled the scheduled swordfight rehearsal. While I went through the cast with a box of sticking plasters, he threw up his hands and stormed out. La Rocha watched him go, looking amused, and one of the younger pirates took half a dozen steps in the director’s wake, mocking Fflytte’s pace. Which I had to admit was rather funny, the gait of an outraged child.
I glanced at Hale, who stood motionless, his eyes drilling into La Rocha. When the door banged shut behind Fflytte, the pirate king turned, still smiling, and saw the Englishman. The two locked gazes for a long minute before La Rocha’s fell, and he spoke a word that caused the hubbub to die.
“Be here at nine in the morning,” Hale said through clenched teeth. Pessoa automatically translated, causing a couple of the men to protest. La Rocha cut their complaints off with a sharp twitch of the hand.
Hale picked up his hat. As he went past my seat, midway down the aisle, he paused. “Have a word with Mr Pessoa,” he told me. “See that his friend understands that Fflytte Films is making a moving picture, not providing entertainment for amateur actors. We can find others willing to show up and work.”
“Why me?” I protested.
“Would you rather have the job of convincing Randolph that he shouldn’t pack up and go home?”
“Er, no.”