Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 (23 page)

I kept the bit about the envelope of film to myself. My instinct, as I remember, was to let the whole thing die a natural death. Charles was free. Our guess about the appointment in the Villa Michele had proved to be groundless. Tonight
Sappho
would sail for Naples, taking Professor Hathaway to her morning encounter with Bob and Eddie. Tomorrow
Dolly
would follow and, united, we should all pile into Johnson’s and Maurice’s cars and drive back to Rome and the observatory. Whatever Johnson was up to, the rest of us would be home for Christmas. I said, “What now?” to Johnson with the dim idea of inviting a summing-up.

“You mean there ought to be something else?” inquired Johnson. Di, with her hair spectacularly done, was lying full length by his knees on the cockpit cushions dressed from head to foot in burgundy velvet with pierrot ruffles in white organdy around her neck and both her wrists. Charles said she looked like a ham-bone but I could see he was itching to photograph her.

I said, “I mean, shall we ever find out what really happened?”

“It’s hard to say,” said Johnson, considering. “It seems unlikely. Two days after you get back, you’re due to leave Italy anyway, aren’t you? If I hear anything, I’ll send you a postcard.”

“You mean,” I said suavely, “that you’re painting the Pope all through Christmas?”

“No. You’re right,” Johnson said. “I shall be busy. I’ll send you a card
after
Christmas.”

Then Di proposed bridge and I went below to start packing. I could hear them revoking all the time I was cleaning my teeth.

To hell with Johnson. And Capri. And the Finnish Observatory. I fell asleep, thinking forgivingly of poor Charles’s watch.

It was the last time I remember feeling forgiving. I was a nice, simple girl up to that evening, refreshingly clear of the current mainstream of received opinion. The twentieth-century equivalent, emotionally, of the horse. It is a handicap I no longer suffer from.

We got halfway to Naples as I remember, when we saw the red flags on the horizon. They were lying out of our way, but it was early morning and we had time to be Good Samaritans and investigate.
Sappho
was already in Naples and Professor Hathaway at this moment would be in the hill post studying Eddie’s logbook.

The rougher ethnic element on
Dolly
were in rather less of a hurry, and in any case Charles, asleep in the saloon, was a formidable obstacle to anyone attempting to prepare breakfast. In the end, I imagine Lenny simply laid the table around him. I know he was still in his pajama bottoms when Di and I eventually stumbled out of our stateroom. I was glad to know he had pajama bottoms. I had never seen them before.

We had had breakfast when Lenny whistled up Johnson. All you could see at that time was a stretch of empty blue sea with a streak of black and white in the distance. “I can’t quite make it out,” Johnson said. “It may be some wreckage.”

“Or a net?” Innes suggested. Fishing nets sometimes broke adrift from their offshore weights and anchors, and the ferry traffic would be at its height very shortly.

“Or a wreck
and
a net?” Charles suggested. He gave me the binoculars. Johnson moved to the cockpit and turning the wheel, pointed
Dolly
straight for the flag sticks. I could see them now very clearly, and a lot of black and white balls knocking about at their feet. They took a long time to become any plainer.

Johnson cut out the engine. He said, “It’s farther away than it seems. I rather think this is a job for the speedboat.”

We had been trailing her, the narrow
V
of her wake inside ours. Lenny moved aft to pull her alongside and before he had her tied up, Charles and Jacko and Innes were in her beside him.

Johnson stood and looked down at them all. “Christ,” he said. “The last treat of the hols. You’ll capsize her.”

But he let them stay and waved Lenny back to the cockpit. “You take her. Keep her screw out of the nets, that’s all I ask you.” A moment later, in a shower of spray the speedboat had abandoned the three of us.

You have crossed the flowing river

To the land of evergreen

Each day I long to see you

But the river runs between.

“Spoilsports,” said Diana vaguely. She was painting her feet in the cockpit. They looked rather nice; like paper doilies as supplied to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Johnson went below having put the wheel on automatic. The speedboat, diminishing, was hitting the wave-tops like a jumping bean and I could hear snatches of sea chantey — Charles, at his most exuberant. Innes and Jacko weren’t singing and I felt sorry for them, but it was their own fault for being so far forward. I said, “If there’s fish in those nets, it’ll stink to high heaven.”

Di looked up with her brush full of henna. “I know what you think,” she said. “You think they’re going to find that net wrapped around a body.”

“Never crossed my mind for a moment,” I answered. I drew a trembling line down to my shin with her dipstick.

“A body,” said Di with satisfaction, “with a scrap of cardboard still in its dead fist. A scrap of cardboard saying
S.M. Capri
twenty/fifteen hundred. Go and watch them through the binoculars and tell me the moment when Jacko sicks up his corn flakes and uova.” She had got The Marmalade on the radio and I couldn’t hear Charles singing anymore.

I took the binoculars and walked around the side deck to the long polished stretch in front of the coach house. Below the hatch I saw Johnson moving about in his cabin. I got the speedboat into focus just as she slowed down to circle the flag sticks.

There was a fingerprint on one of my lenses. I had lowered the glasses to wipe it when I noticed an empty boat in the sea under
Dolly’s
port beam.

There had been no sound of engines. I was trying, I believe, to work out its possible link with the wreck when I saw it was the launch from
Sappho
. I was still looking at her when a man’s arm snapped around my waist hard and held me, and a man’s hand struck down my arms and dug itself sweatily over my mouth.

I kicked the hatch, as I remember. I bit the dirty hand holding my face together and I got my nails in and I dredged up my three bits of mail-order jiujitsu, but Johnson didn’t sprint up with the anchor chain and it didn’t alter the outcome by a whisker. Someone raised a club and someone brought it down on my cranium, sharply.

I fell face downward on the deck of the
Dolly
, and left the roll call of active participants.

I was knocked out once before, playing hockey, and the first time I woke, I rather expected to see the games mistress looming above me. Instead, I was in a kind of fuzzy darkness which made my nose tickle. I let out a volley of head-splitting sneezes and light entered as the fuzz lifted suddenly. Someone spoke in Italian, there was a prick in my arm, and I went to sleep again. Looking back on it later, I thought of four other things I might have thought of doing which would have altered the course of events quite considerably, but I really wasn’t up to it.

The next time I woke wasn’t very much better, but I did have the sense to keep my eyes shut and listen. I was indoors, on a bed with a coverlet under me, and I could sense electric light on my eyelids. I was still, I was glad to find, fully dressed. I could hear someone breathing, and a chair creaked in front of me. I turned, sighing reposefully, waited, and opened my eyes.

I was facing a wall. It was bare, whitewashed and heavily finger-marked, and on it, in green felt pen someone had written EXP 62, QSS C
9
D B ABnv C Bnv I’VE GOT TO MEET DI WILL YOU PUT IT IN THE LOGBOOK.

I was in my own bed in the rest room of the Frazer Observatory, just as I had been when Jacko walked in on me the day it all started. The door opened behind me and I turned, still half awake and thinking, I believe, that it was Jacko all over again and this time when I met Charles and he suggested the zoo I was going to say No and change the whole course of history. A man in a black sweater and trousers came in, glanced at me and said to another man, sitting in the rest room straw chair, “That one is awake. What about the other?”

They spoke in Italian but they were not, I thought, the two men who had attacked me in Ischia. They didn’t look as if they would trouble to call anyone “little darling” before they socked it to her. I said, “What other?” and the man in the chair got up and they both walked, shoulder to shoulder, toward me. I wished I hadn’t spoken. Then I saw they were both gazing at the other bunk which lay up above me.

“He’s awake, too,” said one of the men, and lifting his arm, brought it down suddenly on the bedding above me. The mattress bounced and Johnson’s voice, rather breathless, said, “I want a pot of Indian tea and some toast, lightly done. My friend, I believe, would prefer coffee and cookies.”

I was starving, too, but I shouldn’t have had the nerve. I could feel my nose beginning to swell, I was so glad I wasn’t alone. I said, “Hullo,” huskily to the bed up above me.

“Hullo,” said Johnson. “What exciting lives astronomers lead. Does your head hurt very much?”

I was about to answer him when one of the Italians said something and the other, bending, took me by the arm and pulled me over the edge of the bed. I said, “Johnson!” and Johnson’s voice, perfectly calm, said, “They’re taking us into the kitchen. Do what they say, and leave all the rest to me. They understand English.”

One of them kicked him when he said that; he was just sliding down and I saw it. I didn’t see why either of us had to put up with that. We were two against two and I can kick people too, if I have to. Then Johnson arrived on the floor and I saw his hands were tied together. His jersey was torn and he had bruises all over his face and his glasses were cracked. He looked a mess. He looked at me over his splintered bifocals and said, “I’m afraid there are at least three more unsporting gentlemen outside. Whatever do you think they can want?”

There was, then, no point in resistance. Particularly as I knew as well as Johnson just what they wanted. I walked erratically out of the rest room, propelled by one of our captors, and found myself pushed into the kitchen where Jacko and I had had so many companionable breakfasts, eating Innes’s goodies. There were two other rough types in the room lounging about, and a man, sitting in the chair where I had sat, poring over the film advertisements in the
Messaggero
.

He looked the sort of man who had his own manicure arrangements and others would appear out of the ground if he snapped his fingers. There is nothing quite so chic in the world as a handsome, gray-haired Italian in impeccable Savile Row suiting and a fluent command of endearingly accented English. I had been trying to collect one for years before I met Charles and I know people who cultivated Di in the sole hopes of being able to prise one out of her collection, but she hung on to them all like grim death, and I don’t blame her.

This one was like all the others, smooth and hard-eyed and smiling, and he had my bullwhip in his fingers and was idly snapping it at the feet of one of his minions, who stood there, grinning stiffly. It was the sort of thing that keeps people interested in the wide-screen cinema and I should have adored every minute if I hadn’t been in the same room, instead of watching it. He turned his head when he came in and said, “Ah. Miss Russell and Mr. Johnson. Please come in and sit down. I hope we shall not need to keep you for more than a moment.”

“I hope not. We are rather hungry,” said Johnson severely. They had put him in one of the observatory chairs and were tying his arms to the back of it. In a moment they did the same to me, and we sat pointing our chests at the doorway. The two men who had brought us in stood in front of it, smirking, and the two others had stationed themselves behind our chairs, exuding garlic.

The room seemed full of men, and judging from the cigarette stubs lying everywhere, they hadn’t just come there. On the table at the gray-haired man’s elbow stood one of our precious bottles of vino and a chipped glass, half empty. All our glasses were chipped, and I was glad of it.

He picked up the tumbler while I was watching him and said, “I am sure you are both hungry and thirsty and that you would both prefer to make yourselves tidy before we hold this conversation. I cannot, however, afford to allow either of you out of sight just for the moment. Mr. Johnson, I rather think you have something of mine which I am going to ask you for in a moment. But first, Miss Russell, I want the photographs from Lord Digham’s Zeiss Icarex camera.”

We talk the old times over

We laugh and joke the same

But still it hurts a lot inside

When someone speaks your name.

“She burned them,” Johnson said.

The bullwhip, moving idly, circled around and then snapped in his direction. I could feel the draft of it, and it was less than an inch from Johnson’s face. “When I speak to Miss Russell,” said the gray-haired man agreeably, “it is Miss Russell I wish to answer. The photographs, please.”

“I burned them,” I said.

“So you have been saying. Lord Digham is your cher ami and you were anxious not to embroil him in anything troublesome. But I believe, Miss Russell,” said the gray-haired man, “that you did not destroy that roll of negatives.”

“Don’t be silly, of course she destroyed them,” said Johnson irritably. “She thought at first Charles himself was involved in it. Naturally, she would destroy all the evidence. And so if you don’t believe me, count the number of times the Dome has been searched, and her possessions. You got in today. Don’t tell me you haven’t gone through the entire building to find it.”

The gray-haired man listened quite patiently, I thought, and then, lifting the whip, looked along the handle in Johnson’s direction, one eye narrowed. I said sharply, “Stop it!” The gray-haired man smiled, and then with a savage flick of his wrist, sent the hide flying toward Johnson again. The tip coiled like a spring around his spectacles and, snatching them off, flung them clattering to the far side of the kitchen. “I said,” continued the gray-haired man, smiling, “it is for Miss Russell to answer. Miss Russell, where are the photographs?” The handle of the whip came up again, and this time it was pointing to me.

I was wondering, if I got marked like a mixed grill, whether Charles would still love me. I wondered why Johnson was sticking to my story, and whether the police would get on our tracks and if there was a chance that Jacko and Innes and Professor Hathaway would decide to come on to Rome and do a good evening’s work in the observatory.

Thinking it over, it came to me that there wasn’t a hope. Wherever Johnson and I had been landed, it wouldn’t have been in Naples harbor, but some nice secluded beach with a fast car near it, waiting. And no police force in its senses would hear a story like that and wave goodbye to the yachtload of foreigners who reported it. They would be setting up roadblocks and searching through Naples. The one place no one would ever think of looking for us was inside the Frazer Observatory. “Miss Russell?” the gray-haired man repeated more softly.

I decided Johnson was playing for time, and I had better help him. “You see,” I said, “there were pictures of girls. I was angry with Charles. I didn’t care about his couture photographs. I burned the whole thing to teach him a lesson.”

“When?” said the gray-haired man.

“Monday,” I said. “Monday the sixth, after Charles and I had had our row and he went off to Naples.” I didn’t look at Johnson.

“And where,” said the gray-haired man, “did you burn them?”

On Monday, November 6, I had been all day in the Dome. “In the Dome,” I said quickly.

“Indeed?” said the gray-haired man, smiling again, and this time I did look at Johnson.

It didn’t do me any good because he wasn’t looking at me. He was studying the other man, watchfully. “But,” said the gray-haired man gently, “you could not have burned it in the Dome that Monday, Miss Russell. That Monday the stove was out of action and you did not have any matches.” And the whip, snaking out, curled itself hard around the leg of Johnson’s chair and flung it sideways. It fell toward the sink with a crash of splintering wood and a grunt from Johnson, as he struck the floor with his shoulder and head. He was still tied firmly to it.

They left him there. “And so,” pursued the gray-haired man, his voice hardening, “where are the photographs, Miss Ruth Russell?”

I stared at him. I had forgotten it, but it was true. I had worked all day at the Dome, and Jacko had gone off with the only box of matches. I hadn’t even a light, I remembered, for Maurice’s cigar.

Maurice. And the launch… the launch, of course, had been
Sappho’s
launch. And who else, of course, had the key to the Frazer Observatory but Maurice Frazer? Who else could have nets left by bribery — who else returned early to Naples especially to do so? Who else at 1500 hours had been in the Villa San Michele but Maurice? And who but Maurice could have removed Johnson’s dummy film from the vase in his own bedroom and, having developed it, initiated the search for the real film which was ending here, back in the observatory…?

And it was ending, for Johnson’s voice, rather muffled from the floor was saying, “Tell him, Ruth. It isn’t burned. You know and I know it isn’t.”

And it wasn’t, of course. I said, “Pick him up, and I’ll tell you.”

The gray-haired man laughed. “You will tell us or your friend will be made still more uncomfortable. Are the photographs here in the Dome?”

I looked down. I wanted time to think, and I also wanted time to slide my eyes around to Johnson who proved, with the slightest possible movement, to be shaking his head. I said, “No. I posted them to England.”

“Miss Russell,” said the gray-haired man sadly, and at his tone, the two men by the door moved across and stood one on each side of me, looking inquiringly at their master. “Miss Russell, we know what letters you have posted. There have been none to England.”

“Tell them,” said Johnson from the floor. It came to me that he had always known I hadn’t burned them. I remembered that exhaustive search of the Dome he had launched with Jacko and me after the dud film was stolen. I realized it was my film he’d been looking for. I wondered if he’d spotted it.

The men on either side of me moved restively. On the other side of the room, the door handle moved slowly.

“I need a drink of water,” I said.

“Afterward,” the man in the chair said sharply. He had stopped being suave.

“I feel dizzy,” I said, allowing my eyeballs to slip upward slightly, a thing Charles and I frequently practiced, to the distress of soft-hearted onlookers. The door handle paused and then continued to turn. The door eased forward slightly. The gray-haired man turned and looked at it.

It was a bad moment. On the floor, Johnson wriggled abruptly, his chair creaking, and one of the men aimed an absent-minded kick at his body. The man at my side, in response to a nod from the mastermind, walked softly forward and stood, silently waiting, one hand on the doorknob. The door, pushed slowly from outside, moved another fraction toward us.

I yelled. I didn’t know who it was, but if it was one of ours, I couldn’t let him walk in unsuspecting and cop it. I yelled, I think, “They’re waiting for you,” but it didn’t do a bit of good for at the sound of my voice the person outside flung open the door and charged inward, to receive a full karate chop on the back of her plaited leather choker. A tiny gun went flying and took a chip out of the breadboard.

It
was
one of ours. It was, for heaven’s sakes, Di Minicucci, who was on board
Dolly
when we were kidnaped and whom we had all forgotten. She somersaulted like a hedgehog and ended up full length on her back by the stove with her eyes shut. She had on a midi coat in blended fitch slung over her playsuit and a handbag that didn’t match, but still a handbag. I take off my hat to Di Minicucci. For sheer presence of mind and tenacity she made the whole of “Star Trek” look like pikers.

Then the gray-haired man in the chair snapped his fingers and was given a heavy revolver. He fondled it once or twice, checked his aim, and settled down with one elbow negligently on the table and the other held in his palm. The muzzle of the gun, thus handsomely supported, pointed straight at poor Di’s European hairpiece, just back from the cleaners, and poor Di, reposing gently where she had fallen, was in no situation to dodge it.

“Now,” said Gray-Hair calmly to me, as if nothing had happened. “Perhaps we may finish our business. The photographs, or your pretty young friend will receive some unwelcome attention.” And stretching down he unzipped, smiling, the top half of Di’s Pucci playsuit. The men standing around her grinned and fidgeted.

Half Italy at one time or another has seen Di either half clothed or starkers, but by Di’s choice and in front of Di’s friends, not thugs of this variety. It might not seem like it but Di had something to lose, and that was dignity.

So I was going to tell them, but Johnson got in before me. “They’re in the grounds,” he said. “She buried the negatives out in the flower beds. Show them, Ruth.”

The man in the chair turned and looked at me. “Is that true?” he said sharply.

Without any volition of mine, my eyeballs began to behave in a very queer manner. “Yes,” I said rather thickly.

“Where? Can you describe it exactly?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t feeling very well. “Give her some water,” said the gray-haired man harshly. He waited while I drank it and said, “Then you will show us. Dimitri will untie you. He and Pietro will then take you out into the grounds, and I shall follow you with this revolver. The slightest attempt to mislead us and I will signal Giorgio here to commence broadening your charming young friend’s education.”

I looked at Johnson and Johnson winked and suddenly, for the first time, I saw a gleam of hope in the operation. For the photographs were not in the flower beds and Johnson clearly knew that they weren’t. He wanted us out of the way. And with us out of the way, that left only two men in the kitchen, to guard himself and Diana.

Except that Johnson was tied to a chair, and Di was knocked out.

If indeed Johnson was still tied to the chair. And if indeed I had not imagined, just then, that Di’s false eyelashes flickered.

I made a long, long job of getting to my feet. I crawled to the door and staggered out into the hall and leaned against the front door while they unlocked it and dragged it open. I wondered how Di had managed to follow us. I wondered if she had brought the rest with her and then realized that she must be on her own. Lilian Hathaway might be an eccentric, but she knew when to call in authority. If the others knew where we were, the grounds would already be ringing with police whistles.

Unless, for example, Di had rushed to Naples and asked someone there to send the police up to the observatory. Unless she had asked Maurice to do it.

It was dark outside, and very clear. The lights of Velterra were cozily visible, and at the foot of the hill a window glowed in Maurice’s villa. The garden itself was perfectly silent, save for the trickling of a small fountain by the swimming pool. A light breeze, swaying the poplar trees, hid and disclosed the white flanks of some of Maurice’s statues and, further off, the ghostly pillars of Innes’s Folly, rising like a Necropolis above the hanging gardens ripened on grave-mold. Maurice’s gardeners, unalarmed, would have buried a corpse there. Next year, who knows what bumper crop would dazzle the neighbors.

I put off time as best I could. I wandered up and down marble staircases, pausing here and exclaiming doubtfully there until the gray-haired man, losing patience, pulled my arm tight and high at my back and said, “Enough. You show us now, or your friend suffers. What is that?”

It might have been a compatriot loosing off at the sparrows but it wasn’t. It was the sound of gunfire back at the observatory. I found myself flung back into the arms of Dimitri and his colleague while, gun in hand, the gray-haired man began to run in the darkness to the squat black shape of the Dome. My arm aching, I ran dragging after, in the grasp of the other two men. Then the grip on one of my arms disappeared and I turned, in time to see Dimitri stagger off and sink in a flower bed.