“Having come all this way,” I commented, “it is surely worth our while buying the local gazzetta and seeing who the gossip pages are talking about. We may even find a photograph of the local celebrities. Or,” I said, a happy thought striking me, “we could employ a local detective to see if he can find out whether a local beauty was at a recent ball in London.”
“Good doctor, these are all excellent ideas,” replied the King. “Here is my purse,” he added, passing me over what was in fact a heavy chamois bag. “Feel free to use it as you see fit—whether to buy the local paper or to employ a private investigator. I shall stay here and enjoy the view.”
I went back to the hotel.
On my way I found that a Gypsy band—tall dark types playing violins, guitars, mandolins, and fifes and accompanying a singer—had been allowed to set up in the grounds. Their smocks and hats made a most colourful sight although their music-making, particularly that of their squat vocalist, left much to be desired. I soon stopped watching and went to the foyer. I changed some money at the reception of the hotel, and in the lofty atrium I noticed again the peculiar odour I had smelt at the station on the previous day and, if truth be told, everywhere I had gone to in Venice. In the atrium the smell was modified by the additional smell of paint as an overalled brushman worked away.
I spoke to the concierge about it.
“Ah Dr Watson,” he soothed in good but heavily accented English, “It is the scirocco. It is the wind from the southeast. It comes from the Sahara and brings rain mixed with red sand from the desert. We call it la pioggia rossa or red rain because it is the colour of sangue.” He paused as he cast about in his mind for the English word. “It is the colour of blood.”
“The smell is of a wind?” I questioned, as the smell, to my nose, was not of a natural product.
“No, no sir,” said the concierge, “the smell is of disinfectant. The wind is said to be damaging to the health and so we spray everywhere. It is a precaution we take every time the scirocco blows. And we try and hide the smell as you see, by having Gustavo there do some painting.”
As I headed out of the hotel to the vaporetto stop, I crossed paths with the King. “I am heading to the barbers,” he said, although his meagre head of grizzled hair seemed in no need of a trim. “Good luck in your search.”
There is a vaporetto that does nothing but shuttle to and fro between St Mark’s Square and the Lido. In ten minutes, I was on St Mark’s Square.
Despite what I had said, I had formed no precise view of where I might go to prosecute my investigation and, in the end, decided to go to the British consulate. I am sure as plain Dr John Watson, I would not have obtained any sort of audience with such a vague petition as I had, but my association with Mr Sherlock Holmes soon got me in front of the under-secretary, Mr Britten.
“Your missing person’s enquiry,” said the suave official, “is certainly like nothing I have heard before, but here is a listing of the leading families who are resident in Venice showing where they live and the occupants of their houses. You are right to suspect that many of them are on the Lido.”
I confess I could barely believe my fortune in obtaining such a listing.
“May I ask why you hold such a document?” I asked.
“We represent Great Britain here,” said Britten. “It is of course a coincidence that my name is the same as the country I represent, but I feel I embody my country’s interests. His Majesty’s government needs to know who the most important people are in order to prosecute its own policies.”
I decided to go back to the Lido to show the King the fruits of my visit to the main part of Venice and returned to the St Mark’s vaporetto station. I just missed a vaporetto which had come from the Lido and left to go back there just before I got to the stop. I nodded to the Moeses, who had been on it, and whom I now passed. As I waited on the quay for a vaporetto to take me back to the Lido, the water-taxi of the Grand Hotel de Bains drew up. On it was the King who seemed to have undergone something of a transformation. His whole mien radiated energy, he had dressed himself modishly, and he had had his hair rather obviously dyed. He saw me and said, “I am keen to see the sights of Venice once more. At my age, one never knows how often one will have the chance to see them again.”
“I have some excellent material for our invest…,” I began.
“This evening at the hotel,” came the reply from the King, as he strode purposefully past me.
When I returned to the hotel it struck me that Signor Visconti might know some of the families on the list Britten had given me. Visconti knew my association with Holmes, and I decided to take him a little way into my confidence.
“I am here to conduct an enquiry into a missing person,” I intimated. “I am looking for a young lady of wealth—so, I assume, the daughter of one of the rich families. We suspect she is Venetian. We do not know her name, but she is known to have been in London last week.”
“Many of the wealthiest families from Venice itself and, in fatti, from across the Veneto,” said Visconti thoughtfully, “come to this establishment for family celebrations. They sometimes ask for us to organise pictures of the gathering, and I generally supervise the photography myself as I am a keen amateur photographer, as was my father. I keep back some of the photographs that are the less successful ones out of those taken to see what went wrong. Why not come back with your companion and he can take a look.”
“That sounds most promising,” I said, thinking that even Holmes might be impressed that I seemed to have two lines of inquiry.
I wondered how I might fill the time until the King returned and thought of prospecting the list of names given to me by the under-secretary at the consulate might be the way forward. I asked if I might borrow the hotel’s gazetteer. “With the greatest pleasure, Dr Watson,” came the reply from the concierge. “Here it is. You will find here every piazza, piazzetta, alleyway or calle, as we call them.”
“Not many roads or strade here,” I responded, eager to show off one of the few words of Italian that I knew.
“Indeed not, dottore. Venice is in every way a rule unto itself.”
I took the list from the British consulate and the gazetteer into the hotel’s lounge. I sat noting down the addresses of major families in Venice and their family members. I confess I felt rather like Holmes as he had sat compiling lists of possible suspects from registers of crew members at Lloyds Registry at the time of the Adventure of the Five Orange Pips. The list Britten had given me disclosed details of individual family members, sometimes with dates of birth, so I was able to identify seven names which met the parameters of age and gender. I then matched the addresses to the gazetteer and found that no fewer than four of the families lived within a mile of the hotel’s grand front-entrance.
I was sufficiently pleased with my progress that I decided to seek out the King and went to the hotel reception to see if he had returned. The receptionist smiled when he saw me. “His Majesty returned twenty minutes ago. He declared the intention of going to the tennis courts as he said he has an interest in the game.”
I turned around and headed out towards the gardens.
The Gypsy band, whose music had been so inharmonious previously, had now stationed itself at the foot of the stairs leading down to the grounds. They seemed to have dispensed with their croaking singer and were led instead by a man playing a fife and by a lean fiddler—both clothed in apparel as exotic as the plumage of a parrot. Quite in contrast to their previous performance, they now poured out a stream of untamed and bewitching melodies.
I was not alone in being entranced, and soon a large crowd had assembled to listen. The pipe player seemed never to draw a breath as the music bubbled like a spring in spate from under his fingers, and the violinist, no less a talent, appended a cadenza where he brought his fingers up to only a straw’s breadth from the bridge. It was the fiddler
who introduced each piece in an English accented as though it were Italian—first a siciliano, then a tarantella, then something that to me was not even a name—as the whole panoply of Italian folk music was laid before us.
After another particularly virtuosic dance melody, the violinist and the pipe player started walking among the crowd proffering their hats to collect money.
At the parents of the Polish family, the hat slipped out of the violinist’s hand, and the father helped him to pick it up. Then he got to me. As I reached out to put some coins into it, the hat again slipped out of his grasp, and some coins rolled to the floor. As I bent down to help the violinist pick them up, I heard an incisive whisper in a familiar voice. “Pack your bags and meet me at the reception in fifteen minutes.”
It was only by staring hard after the roughly clad figure, who, once the coins had been picked up, proceeded to collect money from the row of spectators behind without another glance at me that I realized that it was indeed Sherlock Holmes who had spoken to me.
So vehemently expressed an instruction was one I was disinclined to ignore, and in less than the time stated I had my bags packed, and was in the reception where Holmes, now as conservatively attired as if he were back at Baker Street, was already waiting for me.
“The investigation is complete,” he said. “We must to London post-haste.”
“But I have only just got the names and addresses of the lead...” I began.
But suddenly, there was a commotion as one of the garden staff, in fact, Gustavo, the man whom I had previously seen painting in the foyer, dashed in and said something to the receptionist who immediately called Visconti who approached me.
“Dottore Watson! Your friend, the King of Bohemia has collapsed by the tennis court. We need your services as a doctor.”
“Our train from Santa Lucia is in an hour,” I heard Holmes say, but I was not be kept from ministering to anyone in distress.
We headed for the tennis court but when we got there it was obvious the King was beyond medical help. There was no pulse when I put my fingers to his wrist although his face bore a look of seraphic calm rather than being pulled into the contorted state common in cases of sudden death. Although I did make every effort to revive him, life had passed from his body.
“Heart failure,” I said grimly.
A group of people including Gustavo had come with us. I know that Holmes, from his love of opera, spoke Italian, and I asked him to ask the attendant if he had seen what happened. The dialogue that follows is presented as a straight conversation between the garden attendant and me although it flowed through the medium of Holmes’s translation.
“I was planting birds of paradise in the bed outside the wire of the tennis court. Two lads were inside playing tennis, and the man who has died was watching them closely from outside the court.”
“Do you know which lads?” I asked.
“One was fair, and one was dark, but I do not have much to do with hotel guests, so I do not know their names.”
“What happened next?”
“They had an argument about where a ball had landed. They were looking at a mark in the sand when the dark boy struck the fair boy and knocked him down. The man who had been watching them play and rose from out of his seat—I assume to go to the aid of the fair boy. But there was no need as the blond boy got up. But the dark boy knocked him down again before stalking off. The fair boy rose again, turned around, and looked at the gentlemen who was still standing but then fell back into his seat. The blond boy then ran off. And then I saw that the gentleman had slumped right down into his seat. I went over to him and said, ‘Signor?’ When he failed to move, I ran to the reception.”
Holmes thanked Gustavo and he, Visconti, and I went back into the hotel.
“Well, it is perhaps as well,” said Holmes.
“What is ‘as well’?” I asked but Holmes would not be drawn further.
When we got back to reception, Holmes insisted on checking whether the Orient Express was running on time and, when he found that it was late, prevailed upon Visconti to summon the hotel’s motor-launch to get us to the train station on time to catch it.
As we waited for the launch to arrive, Holmes asked Visconti if the hotel needed any signature from me on my departure.
Visconti handed over the guest book and I signed my name against the signature I had provided on my arrival. To my surprise, Holmes leant over my shoulder as I did this, and knocked over the inkpot that spilt over the page obliterating the entries.
“You are obviously still very shaken, Watson,” said he. “But here is the motor-launch. As the King has paid for your room, there is, in any case, no need to provide a signature.”
It was only once we were across the lagoon and heading for Milan that Holmes lit his pipe and said, “Watson, I fear I owe you something of an apology.”
“I was on my way to finding a suitable list of wealthy Venetian ladies who might have been at the King’s ball,” I expostulated, “and you ordered me to leave Venice just as I was about to approach the King with it.”
I told Holmes about the progress of my investigation and he listened with an engagement quite uncharacteristic of him. “I had found seven families in Venice which were of sufficient wealth to have had made a trip to London and who had a daughter of the right age to match the King’s description of the young lady at the ball,” I concluded.
“Ah, the investigation about the lady at the ball,” he said when I had finished. “No, there was never a mystery about that, but the association with the King might have been ruinous for your reputation, and your continued sojourn in Venice might have been ruinous for your health.”
The previous paragraph contains no fewer than three important statements all of which left me at a complete loss; I asked Holmes to explain.
“There is a cholera epidemic in Venice—that is the reason for the pervasive smell. Disinfectant is being sprayed everywhere to try and limit its impact. News of it has got into the international press although it has been kept out of the local newspapers for fear of scaring off tourists.”
“But surely you did not need to come all the way to Venice in person and disguise yourself as a street-musician to tell me that? A telegram from Baker Street would have sufficed.”
“I fear my original enthusiasm about your trip to Venice was because I wanted the King in a known place a long way from London and under the eye of someone I trusted. I needed to carry out an investigation into his original story about which I had the gravest doubts.”
“You did not believe that the ball of which he spoke had actually taken place?”
“No, I disbelieved that he would have had the resources to live the life-style that he was leading if he had had to pay back the dowry which he received for his marriage to the second daughter of the King of Scandinavia as well as paying the Roman Catholic Church for an annulment. Returning the dowry would have been a crippling sum even to a royal purse, and getting an annulment was likely to be even more costly. Yet he had a well upholstered pocket if he could pay for a ball at the Savoy, let alone if he travelled the world seeking its pleasures as he suggested was his modus vivendi.”
“So how did you investigate his affairs?”
“The day after our interview with the King, I travelled to Stockholm and obtained an audience with the King of Scandinavia for whom I have had the honour of performing some services in the past. He told me that his daughter had instigated the separation because of the unnatural preferences of the King of Bohemia which you saw sign of in Venice.”
“Unnatural preferences?”
“Dear Watson, did you fail to observe his interest in Tadzio, the Polish boy? He was trailing him around everywhere.”
I am sure my face showed my complete astonishment at my friend’s statement, and he continued.
“The Ki
ng of Scandinavia would not be drawn into specific details on the behaviour of his fellow monarch but knowing that there was some peculiarity about it put me in to a very difficult moral position.”
“So you asked me to travel to Venice with the Bohemian King who you thought had unnatural desires so that you could carry out a separate investigation into him?” I asked, appalled at what I had been dragged away from my wife to participate in.
“I did all I could to minimise the time you spent away from your home. I went straight to Stockholm and then straight from Stockholm to Venice to carry out my investigation. On arrival in Venice I immediately joined one of the troupes of musicians who are to be found everywhere in the city as I felt I had to observe the King’s behaviour from close quarters. Dressed in exotic garb and playing my violin, I soon formed a view of where his true interests lie. I needed to warn the Moeses and, in fact, I was able to do so, as you saw, when disguised as a street musician.”
“What did you say to them?”
“I told them about the cholera epidemic in Venice and that they should leave for the good of themselves and their children.”
“You could not tell them the truth about the risk to their son?”
“Nothing specific had happened and making accusations about a man’s interest in children is the most serious accusation one can make of anyone. I could not do so without proofs and wanted to avoid the King giving me opportunities to obtain proofs. Telling them about the cholera epidemic enabled me to warn them to leave Venice without casting aspersions on the King.”
“But he would have tried the same thing with someone else. If you had these suspicions, you needed to tell someone in authority.”
“His death has obviated the need for that but going to the Venetian authorities to make such a grave accusation against a monarch when nothing had actually happened would have been a most hazardous undertaking.”
He broke off and drew heavily on his pipe before continuing.
“And I had to ensure your association with him was terminated abruptly. Hence our precipitate departure from Venice and my destruction of the evidence at the hotel that you had stayed there.”
The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 6 Page 5