“My brother may not be aware that he made the arrangements. He kept sending messages to say he’d been delayed, that he would arrive the next day. I thought nothing of it – I’ve had sufficient experience with British builders to expect that any dealings with them will go awry – but when I received your letter on Wednesday and telephoned to his flat, there was no answer. The building’s concierge said he’d been gone for days. I don’t know where he is or what he’s up to, but I didn’t want to wait for him. I forged a document and commandeered his resources.”
How jolly: another warrant for our arrest.
“But you agree that he has a man here?” I asked.
“I’d say the machinations for your getting on board were too complex for Scotland Yard. They carry the aroma of Mycroft.”
“Well, his agent is unlikely to be one of the pirates, since La Rocha brought them. And the film crew have mostly been with Fflytte for a while. That leaves the constables, of whom Clarence and Donald are regulars. What about Alan? He has the watchful air of one of Mycroft’s men.”
“Even if all four of the remaining constables are with us, there are too many innocents standing in the way of harm.”
Plus, La Rocha and Samuel had no small degree of low cunning themselves. And more ruthlessness than either Holmes or I could summon.
“Are you suggesting that we let them continue with their kidnapping?”
“I think it would be more dangerous to move against them now, when they are clearly braced for challenge, than later when they feel secure at their success.”
“Holmes, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“If nothing else,” he mused, “it will be a novel experience. I have been abducted before, but never within the setting of a Gilbert and Sullivan play.”
I considered our situation, and was hit by a thought that made me chuckle.
Holmes looked at me sideways. “I should be glad to hear any aspect of the situation that is merely humorous.”
“A moving picture based on a story of fictional pirates taken over by real ones, and the picture itself hires false pirates to play pirates, who turn out to be real? Fernando Pessoa would die with happiness.”
* * *
We, however, in the absence of our walking conundrum and translator, could only wait with interest for the announcement of our abduction to be made. The handful of pirates that we had decided were in on the plot became ever more tense as the coastline grew before us. The girls began to bubble with the thrill of the adventure. The rest of the pirates happily demonstrated their skills in the rigging to the girls below and to the other ships in the vicinity. The tan horizon line became a shaped coast with long white breakers and a tight collection of stone walls and flat rooftops.
No announcement was made.
We came within shelling range of the city, then rifle shot, then bow-shot, without being informed that we were prisoners.
Finally, the water curling back from our hull took on a tinge of brown, from the waters of the Bou Regreg river that divided bustling modern Rabat on the south from the enclosed and xenophobic Moslem Salé to the north. In its heyday, the river had provided a neat refuge for shallow pirate hulls, while keeping at a distance the deeper draughts of the royal navy. Over the generations, the river had silted up, permitting the passage of small fishing boats and ferries – until the French occupation began, and improvements were made.
The French and English governments would no doubt be thrilled to learn that their European modernisation schemes had enabled the latest generation of Salé pirates to bring thirty-four European prisoners up to the city gates in modesty and ease.
BOOK THREE
IN THE KINGDOM OF BOU REGREG
November 27-30, 1924
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
PIRATES: So stealthily the pirate creeps,
While all the household soundly sleeps.
MEANTIME, THE STEADY breeze serenely blew And fast and falcon-like the vessel flew …em›
Morocco grew near. The girls grew more excited. Holmes and I grew tense with waiting. The odour of sea and ship changed to dust and donkeys, but no word was said of our change in status from film-crew to hostages.
The closest we came to a formal announcement was the look of hard triumph La Rocha shot towards Samuel when the Harlequin’s anchor rattled down.
That, and the cock-a-whoop yells of the two boys, both of them up in the rigging and thus temporarily clear of their father’s admonitory fist.
Anchor down, sails furled – and the whimsical pirate flag long stowed away – I wondered yet again if we were making a terrible mistake. Morocco had risen up against Christians, a dozen years earlier. Salé was the country’s most closed town, mistrusting of foreigners, with a long history of encouraging pirates.
It did not help that the view in front of us was dominated by a cemetery. Ochre city walls rose up on both banks of the blue-brown river, wrapping a town of pale buildings, domes, and minarets on the left – Salé-and of tawny colour – Rabat – on the right. Both were attractive enough on their own, pleasingly exotic, and girded by olive and fig trees. However, the ground between the Salé walls and the pounding Atlantic breakers was occupied by the dead, paved over with thousands of tombs and gravestones, pressed against each other like a gorget necklace of the dead around the town.
I seized myself by my own metaphorical collar. Oh for heaven’s sake, Russell, don’t be ridiculous. This is Gilbert and Sullivan, not Fritz Lang. “Weary Death” could surely have no place beneath this gorgeous sun and those white, curling waves.
Boats had already begun to approach, a veritable queue of brightly painted waterborne taxis coming to gather us away. Such efficiency was unexpected, but I refused to find it ominous. Holmes and I exchanged an eloquent glance, then I allowed myself to be shepherded with the rest of the women-folk, piled into the boats, and rowed ashore.
The girls were thrilled by the whole enterprise, and although some of the maternal chaperones seemed taken aback at their surroundings, none of them thought it odd that no European figures waited to greet us, just as once on terra firma, none remarked on the sensation of enclosure. I looked at the city gate, and saw a gaping mouth. They looked at the city beyond it, and saw a great adventure. The palm-trees were exciting, the donkeys charming, the men in night-shirts and turbans amusing. They even interpreted the large armed men at our sides as servants – although one had only to follow the direction of the men’s gazes to see that they were watching us, not watching out for us.
Every step, every turn, made me less pleased with our decision. But short of digging in my heels and forcing open confrontation here and now, it was too late. We were inside the city; soon, we were inside our prison.
I had thought my companions giddy as we were closely escorted through the narrow labyrinth of the town, zigging and zagging past weavers of mats and sellers of leather slippers, sidling around lengths of embroidery thread strung between a tailor and his child, admiring the heaps of red onions and trays of flat bread and buckets of glistening olives and heaps of fly-specked sweets, breathing in the odours of cardamom and chilli and leather and wet plaster and kif, ducking under the hairy goatskins of a watercarrier and exchanging curious glances with women covered head to toe in ash-coloured drapes, passing under the reed-thatching that turned the streets into mysteriously dim tunnels and by a hundred heavy nailed doors and house-fronts, their few windows high above street-level. The town struck me as relatively quiet, as bazaars go, but it thrilled the girls. However, their excitement as they walked, and the difficulty of keeping them from straying, was nothing compared to their reaction once they were ushered into the place that was to be our prison.