The Secret Tunnel by James Lear Read Free Book Online Page B

Frankie took Bertrand’s hand, and would have kissed it had it not been snatched back. “Well, now, Mitch. As a budding detective, what do you make of our fellow passengers? Have you nosed out a mystery? Are they all they appear to be, do you imagine? Or are they traveling in disguise?”
    This was a matter more suited to my taste than movie stars. “Quite possibly. Look at those two, for instance.” I nodded toward the ample dowager and her cringing companion. “What do you think of them?”
    Frankie glanced around. “That old trout? I’d say that’s Two-Pistols Pete, the scourge of Whitechapel, on his way back from robbing a bank in Morningside. In drag.”
    “And he’s accompanied by Finger Flynn the Gelignite King.”
    “ Ah, mon dieu …” Bertrand looked disgusted.
    “Brilliant disguises, I think we must agree,” said Frankie, with a smirk. “They almost look like real women.”
    “Almost,” I said, “but not quite.”
    “Yes. The moustache is a bit of a giveaway. And what of the young family? Relatives of the Tsar, perhaps, fleeing from persecution…”
    “I feel certain that the children are highly trained midget assassins, dressed up like little girls,” I said. “Any moment now they will leap over the table and murder that old queen of a steward.”
    “And this one?” asked Bertrand, nodding toward the door. It was the handsome young man with the black hair
and the beautiful tweed suit, whom I’d remarked before in company with the two reporters. “If this was a crime novel, what would he be?”
    “Ah, an interesting case,” said Frankie. “I understand that he is a diamond merchant.”
    “No!”
    “Apparently so. From South Africa.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I heard him talking to those newspapermen.”
    “Me too… Wow, a diamond merchant. You should introduce him to Miss Athenasy,” I said. “She’d clean him out!”
    “I’m sure she’d love to,” said Frankie, “but her husband is already kicking up a fuss about the amount she spends on jewelry.”
    “The poor man. He must have very deep pockets.”
    “Indeed he does. He owns the British-American Film Company.”
    “ D’accord ,” said Bertrand. “Monsieur Herbert Waits.”
    “The very same,” said Frankie. “I shall have to watch myself with you, monsieur. You know my employer’s business better than she knows it herself.”
    “Monsieur Waits discovered Mademoiselle Athenasy in a music hall, n’est-ce pas ?”
    “Indeed he did. She was part of an acrobatic trio, the Tri-Angles. Very supple, our Miss Athenasy, or plain Daisy Dawkins as she was in those days.”
    “And he made her into a star.”
    “Yes, he did. She got him up the aisle so fast I don’t think the old man knew what had hit him. And before you knew it, she was getting lead roles in British-American productions. Now, Miss Athenasy has many talents, I am sure, but acting is not among them.”
    “This is true,” said Bertrand.
    “Which means that, in order to stop the picturegoing public from staying away from her films in droves, we have
to make her more interesting in other ways. You know, her clothes, her sporting activities, her love life.”
    “I see. And at present you and Mr. Dickinson are engineering a little romance between her and Hugo Taylor.”
    “Unlikely as it may seem, yes. The public will swallow it hook, line, and sinker, and they will trundle obediently along to see Rob Roy , however dreadful it is.”
    “And what role does Miss Athenasy take in Rob Roy ?” I asked, racking my brain for a vampish blonde in Scott’s novel.
    “Diana Vernon, of course.”
    “Good lord,” I said, remembering the bold, high-spirited heroine of the book. “She’s not exactly as I pictured her.”
    “Well, a wig and a bit of rouge can work wonders.”
    “And Hugo Taylor is Rob Roy?”
    “Naturally. It’s very romantic.”
    “But in the book—”
    “They don’t get together. Of course they don’t. But this isn’t the