Dreaming Spies

by Laurie R. King

  “You have an interest in religion, Mrs Russell?”

  “It is my area of academic interest. Mostly Western religion, but I look forward to seeing something of the East as well.”

  Miss Sato smiled. “You will find Shinto and Buddhism difficult to miss, in Japan.”

  I thanked her for the book, and went in search of my own partner on the Way.

  “Lady Darley did have to explain it a bit, for the Japanese speakers,” I was telling Holmes, later that afternoon. He had been in the Marconi room catching up on the latest in wireless technology—for once, his clothes were not impregnated with coal dust. “Although the thing that confused them most was, who is Harry? She ended up admitting she didn’t know how the English get ‘Harry’ or ‘Hal’ out of ‘Henry.’ ”

  “Not being an expert in Medieval English,” Holmes commented. “But overall, you got the impression of her distress being something by way of a performance?”

  “Not performance, exactly, although eight years is a long time to mourn a cousin. I would say that the emotions themselves might be genuine, but she does not care to lay them out for the appraisal of hoi polloi.”

  “Although she will present them in a manner suitable for her audience.”

  “Many women hide behind a public face, Holmes. Particularly women who marry into a position.”

  The third overheard conversation took place following tea that same afternoon, when I carried the day’s grammar notes to a quiet corner where I might enfold a few more verbs into my brain. The sun deck, up at the top, tended to be less popular in the heat of the day, and even when the sun was going down, it was still too exposed for anyone who wanted to be fresh for dinner. Still, there was a shelter, and some of those chairs were free. I chose one near a trio of older women, who were sure to go down to change for dinner soon, leaving me in peace.

  I greeted them politely, took the furthest-away chair to indicate that I was not actually joining them, and settled down with my notes.

  Their voices quieted politely for a few minutes, but it was only a matter of time before a mosquito-buzz of a voice rose above the endless grumble of the engines, the sing of the wires, and the flutter of the flags overhead, drilling itself into my ear and pushing aside the verbs.

  “… my dear husband, on one of his trips to Manhattan—or was it Chicago? Or maybe Philadelphia. Oh, he took so many trips, he used to joke that it was the only way he could get away from my voice, what a jester the man was, it made him friends all over! What was I saying?”

  “Your hand-mirror.”

  “Of course! Silly me, the mirror. So anyway, Bertie used to bring me a little something after his trips—not the short ones, of course, but whenever he was gone for a night or two—and they were always quite lovely. Sometimes not very useful, he never could remember what size I wore, but thoughtful. And so one time it was this pretty little silver hand-mirror that he said reminded him of the silver brush he’d brought me a month or two before, which was silly because he’d never given me a brush, and when I teased him and said it must have been some other wife he gave it to he got very cross and tried to take the mirror back, but of course I just laughed at him and told him that he must have been thinking of buying me a brush, so of course he did so the next time he went to Manhattan, or maybe that was Atlanta, and that was very pretty, too, even though the bristles were really too soft for my hair, although come to think of it, maybe it’s not as thick as it was then, I should give it another chance when I get home again.”

  She paused for breath, and her companion obediently gave her another nudge. “So what’s happened to the mirror? Did it break?”

  “The mirror? Oh, no! It isn’t there. I mean, it must be somewhere, of course, but for some reason it’s not on my dressing-table. I sat down this morning to do my face and reached for the mirror, and I had such a start, because there on the table in place of the mirror was a little tennis racquet instead! Can you imagine?”

  My eyes, which had been drifting shut under the soothing prattle, snapped open. She let loose a peal of brittle laughter that lifted the hair on my neck.

  The poor woman was terrified. She thought she was losing her mind, and hastened to raise a wall of words against the fear. No doubt she’d done so all her life, using endless chatter to protect herself from the suspicion that her husband did in fact have another wife, that he travelled not for business or escape, but because something in those cities drew him. Now her nervous babble pushed back the suspicion that she had absent-mindedly exchanged two objects that shared a vague outline, and never noticed.

  Her friend stoutly rejected the notion, made reassuring noises, and distracted her with a cheery question about the ship’s hair salon.

  I folded away the pages and turned to look at the trio: the jolly one was plump and emphatically groomed; the fearful one reminded me of Miss Sim, that long-ago tutor who’d got me through the Oxford entrance examinations. The third woman, stout and younger than the others, said nothing at all, either then or later.

  “I beg your pardon.” I interrupted the jolly woman’s description of a disastrous permanent wave involving toxic chemicals and near-electrocution. “I couldn’t help overhearing something about a tennis racquet. Was it child-sized? With black tape on the handle?”

  The frightened one’s eyebrows went high. “Yes! Is it yours?”

  “No, but I overheard a boy talking about one that he’d misplaced. Perhaps he …” What? Went into a stranger’s cabin and traded his beloved racquet for a hand-mirror? “Perhaps one of the stewards made a mistake. Which cabin are you in?”

  She looked pathetically grateful at the idea that her faculties weren’t at fault, and told me at length where her cabin was, how few children there were among her neighbours, what the hand-mirror looked like, and what her husband had said upon giving it to her. I cut her off before we could get into any further detail, shook their hands, and hastened away lest things grow any more complicated.

  Yes, coincidences did occur. But three overlapping puzzles in such a short time suggested more beneath the surface of shipboard life.

  It was time to hunt a poltergeist.

  I hurried down the aft staircase and up the corridor to our rooms. To my surprise, Holmes was already there, and moreover, almost fully dressed, although dinner was not for another hour. He preferred a solitary drink in the cabin to the sociable scrum.

  “Holmes, there is something—”

  “—odd going on, I know. What have you heard?”

  I gave him a quick review of the troubled lady. He frowned, dubious.

  “Why would anyone replace a silver looking-glass with a child’s tennis racquet?”

  “Exactly.” One thing Holmes had taught me well: the power of an enigmatic statement. He was not impressed, but picked up his tie and turned towards the more prosaic looking-glass bolted on the wall.

  “It is more likely that your lady is indeed losing her grasp on both her possessions and reality.”

  “I would agree, but for the ghost in the bilges and the lad’s missing tennis racquet. Don’t you think—?”

  “—that it calls for a few judiciously placed questions? Yes. Hence my intention to take cocktails with the masses.”

  Birds on the high wires,

  Chattering wind in the lines,

  Take flight in the dark.

  Cocktail hour was well under way, a wall of merriment and perspiring bodies. We split up, Holmes fixing his eye on our resident community of retired colonels while I ingratiated myself into a cluster of young wives. Both groups looked at us askance, since we were newcomers into these centres of social intercourse, but both promised to be rich sources of shipboard gossip.

  My merry girls became a touch self-conscious at the addition of a person who had formerly given them wide berth, but a quick joke and a high-pitched giggle confirmed that I was nearly as tipsy as they. We were soon embarked on a hilarious conversation about the oddest things that can happen onboard a ship like this—h
onestly, one would never think that a possession would just migrate like that, or one might see a person in such an unlikely place, or …

  As I maintained the mask of Young Thing, I was aware of Holmes’ voice booming among the retired males: something about racing stock.

  The dinner bell was rung; the cacophony poured down the staircase towards the dining room. Holmes and I met in the centre of the now-deserted lounge to compare notes. Eliminating probable duplicates, we ended up with the following:

  1. A shadow seen among the lifeboat divots

  2. An ape climbing to the crow’s nest at midnight

  3. Odd sounds down one of the air intakes

  4. Turmoil in Second Class: single shoes going missing

  5. Pictures that changed on the walls

  In the normal course of events we would have discounted pretty much all of these as a combination of alcohol and the innate desire to top a neighbour’s story, but we agreed on two things: there were too many odd occurrences to be discounted, and there was a pattern to them.

  Most took place in the wee hours of the morning, and the majority had their source at the upper reaches of the ship.

  We capped our dinner with several cups of strong coffee, then pulled out the trunks from under our beds in search of dark clothing, and spent the intervening hours tormenting each other with Japanese drills while we waited for the ship to quiet. The first wave of passengers took to their beds, followed by those who had been dancing and at cards. The deck-lights dimmed, the sounds of footsteps and running water faded. Eventually, we slipped out from our cabin to make for the nearest companionway.

  I’d had enough experience at this kind of thing to carry one of the light-weight but dark-coloured blankets from the bed: it was dry out tonight, but even in the tropics, an open deck can feel cool.

  The outside steps, used in good weather and during the day, saw little use at night, in part because they were dark (it being difficult for those in the bridge and crow’s nest to see through deck lights). We chose the dim external treads over the brightly-lit internal stairways and ascended to my perch from the afternoon, on the sun deck. Only instead of settling into chairs, we hoisted ourselves onto the shelter roof, and there we lay, facing opposite directions with the blanket tucked firmly over our legs. An hour crept past. Ninety minutes. I was wondering how much longer I could lie motionless with a single layer of light wool between me and a young typhoon, when the door from the aft staircase opened, casting a swath of light across the empty decking.

  Holmes felt me stiffen.

  The ship’s personnel tended to keep an eye on even the darker corners of the decks. A half hour before, a man had come up the forward staircase to run his torch-beam across the bolted-down chairs, over the canvas-wrapped lifeboats, inside the deck’s roofed shelter. But there was no ladder onto the top of the shelter, and he had not chinned himself up to discover us.

  This one strolled down the centre of the deck, casually playing his torchlight across the boats—an entire platoon of pirates could have crouched in them, unseen—before wandering to the underside of our shelter. I held my breath for the sight of a head peering over the shelter roof, but there came only the rasp of a cigarette lighter, and a flare of light from below.

  We lay, breathing in his smoke and listening to his dyspepsia, until he gave a sigh, then walked over to the lee side to let the wind take his burning stub. He headed for the aft stairs, and left us to the night.

  Three minutes later, the same door opened, then closed—only this time, the light that spilt out was dim and indirect, as if the bulb had blown out.

  I did not think it had blown out. I gave my companion’s leg a gentle kick, and when Holmes had eased around to face in my direction, I breathed words into his ear. “Whoever it is, they’re in trousers, and they removed the light bulb before they opened the door.”

  The moon was not yet full and the perpetual haze of the tropics added to the obscurity, but the combination of nature’s illumination and indirect light from the bridge and radio rooms gave glimpses of the figure’s progress: across to where the lifeboats were mounted, up beside them, a pause—then the figure was gone.

  Holmes breathed into my ear, “Under the canvas?”

  I nodded. We waited, and saw nothing … nothing at all. Five minutes passed. After ten, I whispered, “Doesn’t look like an illicit liaison. Could it be a passenger looking for a quiet—wait.”

  I turned my head a fraction to see what had caught the corner of my eye. There were always birds around a ship, although fewer in the middle of the China Sea than near port, but the high motion had not been that of a gull stretching its wings. I let my gaze soften, waiting …

  My hand tightened on Holmes’ arm. He let slip a muted oath.

  Neither of us believed what our eyes told us.

  A shadow moved high among the lines, more a dark absence than an actual figure. The Marconi wires strung between the ship’s twin masts—like a washing-line between flag-poles—were higher than the smoke stacks. Even in broad daylight they looked no thicker than twine. And at night? With any sheen the wire once possessed long covered over with soot? Swaying in the wind?

  “I believe Miss Sato may have misled me, when she said she was not trained in the family business,” I murmured. The chance of there being a second small, superbly athletic person onboard was minuscule enough to dismiss.

  “And clearly, her area of expertise is not in juggling or gymnastics.”

  “We mustn’t risk distracting her.”

  “A fall would kill her,” he agreed softly.

  With care, we edged off of the shelter and crept forward, faces down so that from above, we would be nothing but darkness against dark decking.

  At the forward-most funnel, we planted our backs against the warm metal and lifted our eyes.

  It took a terrifying thirty seconds to locate a faint shape against the sky, moving with excruciating slowness. I began to wonder if the next of the periodic deck-checks would find us here, chins locked upward. As for the night watch in his crow’s nest—well, sailors tended to keep their eyes out for objects in front and on the horizon; this one might not anticipate an approach at his own level.

  Then without warning, she dropped. But before the oath left Holmes’ lips and my fingers had fully clamped around his arm, we saw that it was not a fall, but a swing. As the wire climbed to its anchor on the mast, the increase of angle made further upright progress impossible (as if it had been “possible” before!). Instead, the figure now shinned along the remaining twenty feet to the wood—which must have felt solid as a mountainside after one hundred fifty metres of swaying, half-inch wide, plaited metal. Certainly, she clung to the mast for a time before starting a descent.

  Holmes absently prised my fingers out of his flesh and took a step to the side, the better to see her movement. I was just trying to visualise the complex arrangement of wires and ropes when I saw that she had, indeed, decided not to risk passing an arm’s length away from the man in the crow’s nest.

  The highest of the guy-wires met the mast just below the Marconi line. When that wire’s drooping flags gave a brief jerk, it was clear which way she had chosen for her return to navis firma. The route would take her to the top of the well-lit and always-occupied bridge, but from there, she would most likely hop down the darker aft side of the bridge to the decking around the funnel.

  Precisely where we stood.

  Holmes and I faded back, taking up positions on either side of the massive stack. I stood motionless, my eyes focussed on the air as I waited for movement at the edges of the bridge. It seemed a very long time before one section of dark sky assumed a greater solidity, climbing over the rail and dropping to the deck-boards with a gentle thump.

  She took a step away from me, and Holmes spoke.

  “I wonder if I might—”

  She leapt instantly—fortunately in my direction, but moving so fast, I did not pause for thought, just launched myself at her with a hard
tackle.

  It was like wrapping my arms around a badger. She reacted with the fury of a trained fighter: squirming around beneath me before we’d even hit the deck, using the bounce of our weight to kick out hard, followed by a blow that would have killed me if it had landed a few inches to the side. I flew off with nothing more than a scrap of fabric in my left hand.

  She was on her feet and braced for a sprint when a torch beam went on and a gun went off.

  I staggered upright and looked at the crouching figure of darkness, rendered motionless by Holmes’ warning shot. Her head was visible now—the cloth in my hand was a dark silken mask—but the rest of her, neck to toe and down the backs of her hands, was concealed under a matte, dark blue fabric.

  I brushed myself off, relieved to find nothing broken, then looked at the man with the torch. “You brought your gun?”

  “A good thing I did.”

  “A bit excessive, to capture an acrobat, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Miss Sato is no acrobat,” he said. “Or, not merely an acrobat.”

  “No?” I looked at our prisoner. Her sleek hair was tousled, but the rest of her showed no sign of distress, or even exertion. Slowly, she rose from her sprinter’s crouch, giving me a glance that seemed oddly apologetic. She took a breath, let it out again.

  “I am shinobi,” she said, then smiled. “Ninja.”

  Death walks in silence.

  Eyes see all, but are not seen.

  Ghost walking through walls.

  One thing about shipboard travel: there is always a public room open to welcome insomniacs, card-game addicts, or a trio seeking to remove themselves from the vicinity of a gunshot before the men in the bridge came looking.

  I suppose our odd clothing looked like pyjamas—as indeed it was, in parts. But our behaviour, compared to a herd of young men galloping all over the ship in search of a feathered hat, was hardly worthy of note. We chose the cocktail bar’s dimmest corner, ordered drinks to get rid of the sleepy attendant, and kept our voices low.