She chewed her lip, for a moment. "Okay, that makes sense. Where do I set up, then? You have heard the term 'gun rest,' haven't you? Across this big a river, you can't make a good shot just standing up. Not me, not anybody."
"Relax, willya? Tomorrow we'll look around. We'll find something suitable."
Julie looked at Sherrilyn, who'd come up to the room with them. "Does this Great Commando Leader always plan his operations with such careful and deliberate precision?"
"Oh, hell no, girl. Usually Harry just wings it."
"You're ganging up on me," Harry complained.
"Sure we are," said Sherrilyn. "We're girls. You're a guy."
Julie patted her arm. "Still, we oughta ease up. At least Harry's a guy playing a guy. Now that I've seen the pervert ways of London, I figure that's gotta count for something."
By the time they got back downstairs, Juliet and George Sutherland were back.
"Something is wrong," Juliet said. "Liz has three men staying with her."
"Ah . . ." Harry tried to find the right way to say it. This could get delicate.
"Oh, leave off!" snapped Juliet. "You and your nasty mind. Sure, in times past there might have been the odd fellow coming and going, of an evening. What was that, George?" The last question had been addressed rather sharply at her husband.
"Nothing, dearest. Just talking to myself. Thoughtless habit of mine, now and then."
What he'd actually murmured—Harry had heard it, quite clearly—was several odd fellows, and at any time of day or night. But he thought that remark was best left buried. Perhaps run a herd of horses back and forth across it too, to obliterate all traces, the way he'd heard the Mongols had made sure nobody could find the grave of Genghis Khan and dig him up.
Fortunately, Juliet seemed inclined to let it go. "As I was saying, while it's true that Liz was not exactly what you might call a proper lady, she'd never have had three strange men staying in her lodgings at once. And they look to be settled in, too."
"Especially one of them," added George. That got him another sharp look from his wife, but this one he didn't evade. "Dearest," he said, spreading his hands, "it's just a fact. You saw it as well as I did. Whoever those other two fellows were, she certainly wasn't unhappy with the presence of that one."
"How do you know?" asked Harry.
Juliet looked a bit embarrassed. George, however, was pretty much a stranger to that sentiment. "How do you think? Once we found out where she was living—which wasn't hard, seeing as how it's the same place she was living when we left some years back—we crept up and peered through the window. The bedroom window, to be specific. Juliet, when you speak to Liz again, you should caution her that cheap curtains don't really provide much in the way of privacy. It would have helped if she and her unknown paramour had put out the lamps before they started—well, no need to get into the details."
Harry ran fingers through his hair. "All right, fine. So she's glad the one guy is there, and who knows why the other two are. But I can't see where any of this has anything to do with us. I mean, I didn't mind the two of you going out to set your minds at rest regarding your old friend—or not—but that was just because I thought we had plenty of time to kill. Now that Julie's here, we really oughta get rolling. You know. The Tower. The Great Escape. Stalag 17. Von Ryan's Express. That is why we're here, after all. Not to play Sherlock Holmes."
"Yes, of course," said George. He laid a hand on his wife's shoulder. "He is right, dearest."
Juliet looked very unhappy, but all she did was nod.
Harry offered to walk Julie and Alex back to their quarters. Insisted, in fact, after Alex told him it really wouldn't be necessary.
"I want to get a good look at the Globe. I barely had a chance, earlier, since Julie was in such an allfire hurry to get away from the place."
"Since when did you give a damn about high culture?" Julie demanded. She pronounced it kult-cha.
"Hey, I spent months with Giulio Mazarini. Rome, Paris, places like that. You wouldn't believe how much culture I got exposed to." He pronounced it the same way.
"Oh, bullshit! You were just checking out the red light districts, don't lie to me, Harry. And you'd be wasting your time at the Globe, for sure. Any whores hanging around there would most likely be guys pretending to be girls." The expression that now came to her face was one of Dawning Comprehension. Like Juliet Sutherland, Julie Mackay would never get any plaudits from devotees of method acting. "Unless . . ."