'Bookish' Recap: Episode 5

Bookish airs Sundays at 9:00 pm on WTTW is available to stream on the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Jack has left the employment and rooms of the Books following their revelation of their complicated marriage, in which they both carry on their individual assignations with men. The arrangement protects them both, especially Gabriel, since homosexuality is criminalized. But Jack is uncomfortable with it.

He finds a new job as a bodyguard for two sisters, the exiled Albanian princesses Ruhije and Nafije, who are living in the Walsingham Hotel in London. They were overthrown by Communists in their own country, and fear that the new ruling party wants them killed. 

While they drink at the hotel bar, Jack is spotted by Trottie, who tells him that she and Gabriel miss him. But Jack condemns her and Gabriel’s dalliances and excuses himself. He intervenes as a man back in the bar flirts with Eadie Rattle, a maid who is cleaning up after the man has spilled champagne on himself and the floor. 

The man is Captain Victor Orr – and he’s Trottie’s companion for the day. She met him in an air raid during the war and was looking for exactly the kind of fun dalliance Jack just condemned – but Victor has gotten soused. Trottie pulls him to the bar, away from Eadie, who has retorted at Victor. Victor recognizes the Albanian princesses and includes them in a round of drinks that he orders for himself and Trottie.

As the drinks are served, Ruhije drops her purse and spills coins from it. Victor rushes to help gather them up. He then asks Trottie if she wants to retire to his suite with him, and she refuses. He takes a sip of his drink, chokes, falls to the ground, and expires.

The heat and electricity are out at Book’s, where Nora has been pilfering coins from the stash meant to feed the meter. Sergeant Morris arrives at the darkened shop on behalf of Inspector Bliss, in search of a book called “The Kanun of Scutari.” Book has it – in its original Albanian. He is ordered to bring it to the Walsingham, where the princesses have requested it in the wake of Victor’s death by poisoning.

That’s because the “Kanun” is a legal code, with rules for revenge and punishment. The princesses believe that the hotel bartender Ismail Guzili, who is from their country, has tried to kill them. Not only do they always reject the first round of drinks made for them – which is why Ismail has learned to make them with tap water and not waste alcohol – Nafije also switches her drink with another person, hence the distraction of dropping the purse. In this case, that person was Victor. She suspects the poison that killed him was meant for her.

This is the third attempt on the sisters’ lives since they came to London from New York, they tell the nervous Inspector Bliss. Ruhije now carries a gun for safety. The Communists could want them dead, or their third sister, who renounced the royal family and joined the Communists. 

Morris searches the room in the hotel that Ismail shares with the other bartender, Marco Barberini, and finds a book hidden under the mattress with a Communist poster inside. Ismail says he doesn’t care about the princesses; they left his country to fend for itself against Mussolini. 

Ismail is also under fire from the maid Eadie Rattle, his girlfriend, for not standing up for her as Victor made a pass at her. It wasn’t even Victor’s first attempt to sleep with her that day. But she has been chastised by the hotel manager Mr. Kind for yelling at Victor, who was one of their guests.

Indeed, Trottie now takes over Victor’s suite with Gabriel, who sends word for Nora to find a copy of a German translation of the “Kanun” so he can actually read and understand it. Victor is a frequent guest in the same room, which is next to the princesses’ suite – always with a different woman. 

Marco suggests to the police that the princesses poisoned Victor: Marco suspects that Victor was in British Intelligence during the war, and Intelligence agents handed the princesses’ country to the Communists. Victor recognized the princesses, so he may have played a part in the coup against them, and they could be looking for revenge. 

Intelligence is indeed keeping an eye on the princesses, but not through Victor. Gabriel, who did Intelligence work during the war, has been asked to watch them for threats against them due to violent letters they have received – that was what his meeting with the man with the eyepatch was about. And that man helped Gabriel find Jack, who is the son of his German lover Felix, whom Gabriel had to leave behind in Germany during the war. 

Gabriel also spent time with the hotel manager Mr. Kind during the war – they’re both gay, and hung out in the now-closed basement bar of the hotel. Kind got Jack the job as the princesses’ bodyguard upon Gabriel’s request; that is how Gabriel is keeping an eye on them. 

Jack takes a break from guarding the princesses’ room for a cigarette and runs into Eadie, who calls the princesses parasites – she’s a card-carrying Communist. But she was having a cigarette when they were poisoned. 

Trottie suggests another possible culprit: a woman who handed her a towel to clean up Victor after he spilled champagne, with an intensely disdainful look. 

Unsurprisingly, things are tense at the Walsingham, which is powered by its own generators – but they’re on the fritz, so the lights are flickering on and off. Downstairs in the staff quarters, Morris arrests Ismail. Upstairs, in the suites, the lights go out. A gunshot rings out. Gabriel rushes to the princesses’ room as he hears Jack call to Eadie, then ducks as Ruhije fires another shot, this time at him.