Dreaming Spies (8 page)

“Their being here does sound reasonable,” I mused. “I’d guess there is a growing market for fancy English goods in Japan, especially after their Prince Regent visited Britain three years ago. As for Darley, there could be money in it for him, if he provided his friend with any likely contacts.” It was one of the few jobs for which impoverished nobles were qualified: converting the Old Boys’ Network into hard cash. And if the wife had money of her own, well, the wife didn’t have to know about the transfer of pounds sterling from one old boy to another.

Holmes scowled, but he did not argue.

Black from their shovels
,

White with their pure thoughts and prayers
,

Red runs through the veins
.

We docked at Colombo early the next morning, after a night in which my card-dreams turned to earthquakes, no doubt inspired by Miss Sato’s lecture and underscored by the nauseating roll of heavy seas. I’d spent the latter portion of the night seeking fresh air on the top-most deck, trying to count the blessings of a rolling ship: an absence of competing musical airs wafting from the staterooms (the skip of needles being hard on gramophone records); no mid-night shuffleboard or deck-tennis games; less danger of being set upon by the profoundly intoxicated (who were kept gently but firmly behind doors by the stewards whenever the seas were rough).

Not that counting had led to much sleep. However, the day’s lesson with Miss Sato was to be delayed, as she wished to go ashore with her admirers during our half-day in port. I intended to take advantage of her absence, and the motionless decks, to sleep.

Once, that is, the tumult had died down. While the Colombo-bound passengers and day-trippers jostled noisily down one set of gangways and the coal and coconuts streamed up another, I retired to a deck-chair
with my book. Holmes glowered down at the teeming dock-side below. I pointedly kept my eyes on the pages.

“What do you make of her, Russell?”

He was not asking about Lady Darley. “Miss Sato? She seems both intelligent and competent.”

“Yes.” He drew out the word. I was not surprised when it was followed by the sound of his cigarette case clicking open.

I sighed, and let the book fall. There are drawbacks to having a husband with a restless mind. “Too competent, you think?”

“Your initial impulse was suspicion,” he reminded me. “Your instincts have been well honed.”

“ ‘Instinct’ is hardly the word. More like ‘reflex.’ I see nothing in Miss Sato to make me doubt that she is what she said, unlikely as it sounds.”

“The daughter of an acrobatic dynasty, sent for education to an American university.”

“No more dubious than half the people we come across. What are you—” I stopped. Oh, for heaven’s sake: were blackmailers not sufficient challenge for a simple sea voyage? Now we had to add espionage to the mix? “You think Miss Sato is a Japanese spy? Or do you mean she’s working for Mycroft?” It was true that if anyone could envision Haruki Sato as a secret agent, it would be Mycroft Holmes. My brother-in-law’s complex, imaginative, and apparently ubiquitous information-gathering machinery left the official Intelligence of any nation in the dust. If Japan’s secret police were up to that level of creativity, I was prepared to be impressed.

“Why would one of my brother’s agents not have identified herself?”

“Because it’s your brother.”

“Hmm. And if she’s not his?”

“Who else—oh. Your blackmailer?” I felt a headache coming on. “Because she came aboard just after he and his wife did?”

“Because two unusual events are often linked.”

“Oh, Holmes. Do you have any reason whatsoever to suspect that the Earl of Darley is a crook? Any evidence that he ever was, for that matter? Or that Haruki Sato is not what she appears?”

“None,” he replied serenely.

I rested my head back against the deck-chair and closed my eyes. I was well accustomed to my husband’s need to manufacture work for himself, but doing so two days into what might be considered a holiday did not bode well for the coming weeks. “Do you want to stop the lessons?”

“I see no reason to do so,” he said. “She is a more effective teacher than the stoker.”

“And lessons with her won’t leave you black with coal dust.”

Neither of us needed to add the additional reason: keeping her close kept her under observation.

I attempted to push the conversation past this random assortment of criminal suspicions. “Do you think we’ll have enough of the language to stumble through on our own?”

“I imagine we shall find schoolboys in every village, following us about, eager to practise their English.”

“Yes, I don’t suppose there’s much point in trying to go incognito.”

“Not unless you’re willing to act the hunchback day in and day out.” He and I would have to lose six or eight inches to pass for even a tall Japanese—to say nothing of arduous makeup. “I’m too young to begin a lifetime of back problems, thank you. We’ll have to resign ourselves to attracting attention wherever we go.”

“Perhaps not.”

“You have an alternative? Other than amputating our legs?”

“We will be conspicuous no matter what. The trick is to be easily dismissed thereafter.” He had something in mind: I waited for it. “Russell, I propose we become Buddhist pilgrims.”

I snorted at the picture of Sherlock Holmes in pilgrim garb, chanting his rosary.

“You believe me uninterested in Nirvana?” he asked.

“I was thinking more about the Buddhist tenet that all things are illusion.”

“That is one doctrine I might have difficulty espousing,” he admitted.

“Surely we’d stand out even more in those white pilgrim robes? Do they wear robes?”

“A short jacket and trousers, white, plus a hat and staff. In which we would no doubt attract notice. But once the locals had marvelled over us, their minds would be at rest.”

“English Buddhists?”

“Mad Westerners are all over.”

With that, I had to agree. And having just left India, where to be a foreigner is to become a magnet for every beggar, cab-driver, and tout for miles, I had no wish to repeat the rôle. “If we don’t want to go as ordinary tourists, I’d guess pilgrim is worth a try. Surely it won’t be difficult to memorise a few prayers and hymns.”

“There is a group of touring American Buddhists down in Third Class, robes and all.”

“
Third
Class?”

“Practicing humility, one supposes.”

Inwardly, I sighed. Outwardly, I put on an attempt at enthusiasm. “Oh, good.”

Abruptly, he stepped away from the railing and made for the companionway. “You’re going down now?” I asked him in surprise.

“Miss Sato has just left the ship. The Darleys went twelve minutes ago.”

Oh, dear. I called out at his back, “Holmes, there may be servants.”

“I enquired. The earl, his wife, and his son are all doing without on this voyage.”

“Really?”

“So I am told.”

“Well, would you like me to stand by with another vase of flowers?”

He did not reply. As the top of his head vanished down the steps, I muttered under my breath, “Please don’t get caught.”

He did not get caught breaking into the cabins—not quite. His search of the Darley staterooms was briefer than he’d have liked, since the cleaners were working their inexorable way down the line of rooms, but he managed to overturn all the relevant parts of the suite. However, he found
nothing to support his suspicions. When it came to the Darleys, the most incriminating evidence he discovered was the earl’s collection of outré books and photographs, and even those would have been legal in some of the countries we put into. Lady Darley’s shelves testified to an intense interest in Oriental art, including two what he termed “sprightly” volumes of erotica. Her clothing was expensive, her jewellery extensive, and she appeared to spend an inordinate amount of time before her dressing table mirror.

Miss Sato’s rooms were the very opposite: her clothing and personal goods were sparse enough to cause speculation. Were the First-Class accommodations a gift from someone with greater means? When I pointed out that her hasty arrival might have prevented her trunks from joining her, and that in any event, the few clothes she did have were far from cheap, Holmes reluctantly agreed that even the pyjamas he had seen beneath her pillow were made of heavy silk.

“There’s your answer,” I told him. “Even if her trunks did make it on, she has the sense to limit what she exposes to the trials of sea travel.” Between smuts, sticky salt air, and the occasional burning ember from the stacks, the experienced traveller locked away the bulk of her wardrobe.

His search left Holmes, as one might expect, unconvinced.

The day-trippers began to trickle back as lunch was being cleared. When Miss Sato had refreshed herself and washed away the grime of the city, we met for a brief language tutorial. As she was writing down the words we were to commit to memory before the next day, the purser came in to ask if she still wished for the salon that afternoon, considering the lateness of the hour.

“Not if it is inconvenient,” she told him. “Or if you like, we could take afternoon tea along with conversation. Japanese tea as well as the English? I bought some in Colombo, for the purpose,” she added.

“What about those special cups?” he asked. “They might be harder to duplicate.”

“Western tea-cups would do nicely.”

After a few more questions, and after Miss Sato’s polite but firm reminder that he had agreed to welcome those of her countrymen who were in Second Class, he retreated.

Her eyes lingered on the empty doorway. “He is very helpful, considering the extra work.”

“A purser’s job is to keep people happy,” I replied mildly. Indeed, the man was probably overjoyed to be given the means of entertaining those passengers who could be even more of a handful than energetic young males—namely, wealthy older women. Yes, he’d been reluctant to encourage the mixing of the classes, but he could see that bringing up a few more Japanese passengers—guest lecturers, as it were—would more than compensate for any complaints from their excluded Caucasian fellows.

The afternoon’s demonstration of
o-cha
—honourable tea—included comments on the taste, the equipment, and the ceremonial aspects of both Japanese and English tea. The more or less captive audience guaranteed that curiosity was roused for the remainder of the voyage. As the days went on, the informal lecture series expanded to include food, flower arranging, calligraphy, furniture (or the lack thereof), games, the disinclination of Japanese to shake hands and the subtleties of the bow (and especially the matter of how to perform the tricky simultaneous bow-handshake with a Japanese businessman without cracking into his skull), and the best methods of stepping out of shoes and into slippers. I doubted that most of the assembled would remember to give and to take with both hands, and I could not imagine any of them would replace their handkerchiefs with slips of Japanese tissue; however, the salon was packed to the windows with the eagerly attentive on the days given over to those two all-important questions the young men had first requested: communal bathing, and what a geisha was for.

But all that came later.

Colombo marked the beginning of the greater voyage. The temporary residents of the
Thomas Carlyle
disembarked, with new passengers bound for Manila, Hong Kong, Kobe, and beyond. Seating at dinner and on the
decks was re-shuffled, groups re-formed, conversations were repeated, new friendships begun. And old friendships re-kindled.

In the salon that night before dinner, amidst a mixture of evening wear (the continuing passengers) and not (the freshly boarded and therefore un-ironed), all eyes surveyed the room for the new and interesting. Having lost the professor of botany, our table was so sparsely populated that we risked being assigned random passengers by the purser. Rather than face that danger, Holmes and I were watching for one or two likely replacements. I had proposed an old lady with a wicked gleam to her eyes, a tall man with weathered skin and the scar of frostbite on one ear, and a duo of lesbians. Holmes had countered with a nervous-looking scientific woman with acid stains on her fingers, a too-smooth man with the manners of a gigolo, and two stocky individuals who could only be a criminal and his bodyguard.

Our debate over these options was interrupted by a loud drawl coming from the scrum behind me.

“By God, is that Pike-Elton? Monty, old man, what are you doing in these parts?”

Everyone there who was not completely deaf turned to watch Thomas Darley make his way to the entrance and exchange handshakes with a slim young fellow with sharp-looking teeth and sleek black hair.

“Tommy, my good chap, I could ask the same of you!”

The talk rose around us again as people turned back to their interrupted conversations. Holmes and I kept one eye on the pair now making their way towards the cluster of the viscount’s particular friends, which included, unlikely as that seemed, Haruki Sato.

(Our table picks, by the way, were Holmes’ nervous lady scientist and my mountain-climber. As it turned out, his was by far the more interesting choice—but there is a story for another time.)