Pirate King by Laurie R. King

too late.
    Sherlock Jr was, bizarrely, a similar film-within-a-film, the embedded adventure of a young fantasist whose nap-time clamber onto a cinema screen translates into a picture by the “Veronal Film Company.” The audience around me laughed uproariously, but it made me quite dizzy to watch Keaton’s phlegmatic battering by a rapid change of scenery. It was no less disorientating when he became a Crime Crushing Criminologist with an assistant named Gillette faced by a pretty girl, a dastardly foe, a criminal butler, and the most astonishing sleight of hand and stunt-work that I had ever seen. I blinked, decided that I was plastered to the gills, and waited for the next film to be as hallucinatory.
    But that one was called The Perfect Flapper , and although many of the characters projected onto the sheet were drunk, I was clearly not.
    I went the rest of the voyage without benefit of opiates. Sobriety did not help: I remained ensnared in a make-believe world.

    Eventually, on a dreary, sleet-spattered November morning a thousand storm-swelled miles from that untidy Covent Garden office, I wove down the Lisboan gangway in search of a poetical individual. It being 1924, and the weedy, artistic look being all the fashion even in this distant enclave, there were several melancholics who fitted the description. I eliminated those bearing expensive accoutrements—two wrapped in thick overcoats and one sheltered under an elaborate silken umbrella—since any man taking stray translator jobs was unlikely to have generous resources. When I had also dismissed those men already in groups, I was left with three persons. One looked far too eager: He had to be waiting for a loved one. Another looked as if he should be in bed: If that was my man, his pallid languor suggested it would be less work to learn the language myself. When my boot touched down on the solid dock, I elbowed my way through the crowd to the undernourished, bespectacled figure that remained.
    “Senhor Pessoa?” I asked.
    He dashed the stub of a hand-rolled cigarette to the ground and snatched off his hat. “Miss Johns?”
    “Her replacement, Miss Russell,” I said. “Is all ready?”
    “I booked cars for the day, as you requested,” he replied, “although as foreigners, you should have been safe enough …” A disturbance behind my back made his voice trail away and his jaw ease open.
    I did not need to turn around to know what he was seeing, although I did. There is an undeniable fascination with oncoming catastrophes, a basic human inability to tear one’s eyes away from runaway lorries, banana peels on crowded pavements, and overbalancing waiters with over-laden trays. Such was what stood now at the top of the gangway.
    Between the built-up shoes and the oversized hat, the man now taking his place in the miraculously vacant passageway barely cleared five feet, but by his attitude, he towered over all he surveyed. The sun seemed briefly to emerge from the gloom, although that could have been the effect of the newcomer’s brilliant white fur coat, his equally brilliant teeth, and the enormous diamond on his right pinkie finger, which had been expertly mounted so as to adorn a finger considerably narrower than the stone itself.
    Randolph St John Warminster-Fflytte, founder and sole director of Fflytte Films, the man on whose boyish shoulders the future of the British film industry sat, Hollywood’s coming rival, whose five generations of family fortune were riding on the surviving heir’s keen understanding of the taste of the common man.
    From all I had seen of him on the voyage from England, which was rather a lot, the wager was close to being a sure thing. Fflytte had spent his youth embracing the taste of the masses; now he had more in common with his young would-be actors than with the likes of Barrymore and the generation trained by stage.
    Fflytte had made his name (“Fflyttes of Freshness!”) with three pictures that cumulatively did for