Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 (25 page)

Someone fired a shot and someone shouted. Someone started a scuffle and someone, raising his voice, ordered Giorgio and Pietro to stand guard at the door. A voice outside, self-consciously sonorous, said, “Unless by the count of twenty you emerge unarmed from your doorway, we shall with regret have to make use of both gas and explosives.” Prince Minicucci’s voice, clear and final, said, “Diana. Put on the power.”

The arc lamps of Mouse Hall, blinding, dazzled us. They shone on Innes, astride Dimitri and thumping him, and Pietro, ceasing abashed to attack Giorgio, who continued punching. They shone on Diana standing still by the switch and wringing her hand, from which I had just twisted her revolver. They shone on Prince Minicucci, still and straight-backed and triumphant on his flat stool-top, bearing in his right hand the roll of film which would make him welcome, I supposed, in whatever country he intended to end up in. And they showed Johnson, standing in the spot from which he had only once moved, by the Incubator. Only the white blocks of the Incubator were all tumbled askew and in Johnson’s hands, and pointed at Minicucci’s breast was the red laser. “Thank you, Diana,” he said. “Perhaps you will join your father and Pietro and Giorgio. Innes, you might release Dimitri and relieve Ruth of the gun. Minicucci, I’ll have that film, please.”

“Will you?” said Prince Minicucci. He looked with distaste at Johnson and at his laser. Then, with a flick of his thumb, he sent the film flying, to flash and sizzle to nothing in the mesh of cables over his head. “So,” he said. “Some of the evidence has disappeared.”

I didn’t know what I felt. I dared not look at Innes who, with Diana and the three men to cover, had no time for Johnson’s affairs. Minicucci, still under the threat of the laser, was descending with care from his stool. It was only then that I remembered Professor Hathaway saying something about Minicucci’s laboratories.

If he had laboratories he would know, as Innes did and I did, that the red laser beam used in our astronomy is utterly and totally harmless.

He did know. He reached the ground, paused, and without warning dived for Johnson.

And Johnson, miraculously, was expecting him. Instead of becoming a shield for Minicucci he sidestepped and swinging the gun like a club, cracked it across the Prince’s fine, tailored shoulders and then caught him under the chin. Innes fired. The Prince staggered, grunted, dropped and rolled over.

Diana didn’t run to him. Maybe she saw he was dead. Maybe she didn’t care anyway. Maybe her wits were sharper, on the whole, than her father’s. She didn’t utter a sound. Instead, she hurled herself on the floor and flung the power off again.

We were girl against girl and three men against two. I couldn’t fight Diana, although you could tell where she was by her Le Galion. I couldn’t even help Innes and Johnson: among the fighting, buffeting bodies it was impossible to make out anything but, occasionally, Innes’s aftershave. Soon, the police were going to shoot the locks off and burst in on us, firing. Soon, someone else was going to be killed, and I didn’t want it to be me or Innes or Johnson.

I knew what I had to do, and it seemed a pity I couldn’t warn anyone, but it took all my energy to reach the side of the room where the crank was. Then I fitted it into its socket and, toiling, rolled back the roof of the workshop.

A yellow glare from the sky split the darkness. For a moment, the struggle slackened, and then with fresh vigor renewed itself. Even if Di and her friends realized what was happening, they were far too busy to track down the mechanism. The ratchets ground and rumbled like a trailer going over a cattle grid. I hoped the police outside would notice it.

They did. I had cranked the roof a yard back when the first gas bomb arched through the opening, and I went on cranking until three more came and burst on the Incubator. Then I did my best to crank it shut again, to keep in the full body and flavor. I got within a foot or two as well before I had to give up, coughing and retching, by which time the police had the door broken.

Inside they found no opposition. Only seven very sorry people, and a mouse that had died in the course of its duty.

“I propose,” Johnson said after the police had gone, “an Anglo-American funeral with full military honors, and crossed Cuddle bags on the gun carriage. Hard cheese, Innes.

“
A little flower, lent not given,

To bud on earth and bloom in heaven.
”

“I only kept her for amusement,” said Innes stiffly. “I am a scientist, you know. I assist my country on occasion, but I am expected to place my own work first.”

He had been apologizing ever since we arrived at Maurice’s, which we did about midnight, leaving Di and our complete personal histories in the hands of the police. The first thing they had done was advise Naples and the Villa Sansavino that we were alive, which pleased Maurice and Timothy and Professor Hathaway and Jacko, who had just arrived there, having been told quite simply by Diana that I had fallen overboard and Johnson had drowned trying to save me.

They had remained in Naples all afternoon while the police and harbor people were looking for us. Charles and Innes and Lenny had reacted differently. Lenny, following a hunch, he said, of Maurice’s had followed Di when she left the others in Naples, saying she wished to avoid the photographers. And Innes, convinced that Johnson and his friends were the villains, had followed Lenny, to whom, in fact, we owed the arrival of the police at the observatory.

Charles hadn’t followed anybody. Charles, knowing who Johnson was, had discerned a dark plot to kidnap me and wrest from me the supposed hiding place of the film and had lit out wildly for Rome, driving up one-way streets and plunging through yellow-taxi lines until finally he ended up in the British Embassy, begging them to put the Prime Minister on to finding me.

By that time we were at the Questura, making our statements. The moment when Charles burst in and collected me in a grip like a waffle iron was not one I am likely to forget. After years of cackling at moonlight on water he went completely to pieces and cried into my Capri cruising wear while I patted his shoulder. Innes went bright pink and went away for the fourth time to phone the American Embassy while Johnson stayed right there, enjoying it. Even now, sitting in Maurice’s study with one of Professor Hathaway’s Tricosa cardigans over my shoulders, I was wearing more of Charles than any other single garment. I didn’t expect to be kidnaped again, but it was reassuring all the same.

Everything was reassuring: the meal we had had at the Trattoria Sinigaglia in Parassio where Charles announced he would discard me if I did not at once renounce my diet, and where we had pork stuffed with rosemary and garlic and liters and liters and liters of Castelli wine in tall waisted jugs with glass seals and no handles. I discarded my diet. Worry can do more for you any day, dimagrante-wise.

It was reassuring to be welcomed into the villa by Timothy, even if he did pour coffee for Charles and Johnson, bending over the silver, lightly sun-kissed by Sicilian skies, before bringing me mine.

It was nice to be squashed by Jacko and receive a hirsute kiss fragrant with seafaring aromas. It was unexpectedly disconcerting to receive a dry embrace and a touch on the hair from Professor Hathaway who saw, withdrawing, the drip on my chin and dispersed it. “Early to bed,” said my Director with some briskness. “You’ve done very well. Early to bed, don’t you think, Johnson?”

The time being midnight, the suggestion was more well-intentioned than practical, particularly as Johnson seemed to be for some reason included in the program. Johnson himself paid no attention, being occupied in filling his unpleasant pipe and lighting it. He had found another pair of bifocal glasses and had changed his seagoing gear for a Clydella shirt and cable-stitch pullover. Seated on the base of his spine he was thus immune to the frequent glances of Innes, who had not changed at all and whose kipper tie was blotched with blood and tears and spit from the polizia’s gas bombs. At length Innes said, “Must you?”

Johnson, Professor Hathaway and Maurice himself all paused in the act of striking fresh matches and gazed at him. I was reminded of something. “Maurice,” I said. “I owe you an apology. At one point this evening I had nasty thoughts about you.”

“How delightful,” Maurice said, puffing out Avana smoke forgetfully in the direction of Innes and smiling with that particular silvery sweetness which has endeared him to generations of nubile young visitors. “How delightful to be sixty and still have nasty thoughts entertained about one. Unquestioning adoration is only for the angels, and so are all the boring sorts of devotion. I know you thought me guilty, and I am pleased by it. Innes, on the other hand, is offering you sugar and will shortly give you a brandy because he is overcompensating. He thought you were guilty, and is now ashamed of it.”

“Innes! Did you?” I said, fascinated. A shower of demerara sugar slid down the Tricosa cardigan as Innes knocked the spoon sideways. He put the bowl down crossly and took his seat between Johnson’s pipe and Professor Hathaway’s Manikin. He said, “When the cameras became so suspiciously mixed, yes. And your presence at the Fall Fair was unexpected.”

“I don’t see why,” I said, mildly astonished. “It was in my balloon after all. We wondered, come to that, what you were doing at it. How, by the way are your calluses?”

Innes looked bemused.

“She means, How are your Trappists?” said Johnson kindly. “Don’t listen to her, she will only confuse you. Innes was at the Fall Fair, Ruth, because he had offered to help track down some rather worrying leaks from our brave nuclear physicist boys in the Palassio Institute. Everyone felt he had spotted the gentleman responsible, but no one knew how he was getting the dope passed on to his opposite number. Then it turned out he had this nineteen-three Baedeker…”

There was an awed silence. “
Intercourse with Italians
?” said Timothy.

“Which Di bought at the Fall Fair from Mr. Paladrini,” I said. “Di. Of course. But Innes, you left.”

“I left,” said Innes with dignity, “in order to follow Diana in due course unobserved and witness what happened to the Baedeker.”

“Which you might have done,” said Johnson understandingly, “if…”

“If Diana hadn’t given him the Organizer’s crocodile handbag,” I said. I looked at Charles and then remembered he hadn’t been at the Fall Fair and collected instead Johnson’s modified approbation. “So he was pushed down the steps and…”

“And drugged,” said Innes coldly, “by Mr. Harrogate.”

Timothy looked contrite. Maurice said, “By Timothy? What with? Timothy, I will not have you white-slaving in Italy.”

I said, “With Jungle After-Shave, the Essence for Men Born to Conquer. Timothy didn’t mean any harm. Truly. But, of course, it allowed Di to get the message out of the Baedeker.” Light broke upon me. “Innes! You dragged that Baedeker all through Ischia and Taormina. It doesn’t go any farther south than Central Italy.”

“I had a theory,” said Innes coldly. “It proved wrong. I’ve already told you. I deeply regret what occurred in Ischia.”

Professor Hathaway sat up abruptly. “You are not referring to the fish tank?”

“He is referring,” I said, “to the two thugs he set on me at the Aragonese Castle. You thought I had the film from Maurice’s vase, didn’t you, Innes? Or was it even the contents of the Baedeker? At any rate, you paid these two characters to search me and they did rather more than you bargained for.” I had been nursing, since I realized that, a rather endearing vision of Innes getting drunk on the strength of it.

Charles said, “Wait a minute. Innes, was it you who searched all our belongings? By God…”

His face, during the account of the attack in the Aragonese Castle, had been growing blacker and blacker, but at least he wasn’t smoking. Innes said, through a mild fog of tobacco ash, “Naturally, I was interested to see who had stolen the film. I searched the vase for the film as soon as I woke up and heard what had happened —”

“I remember,” said Maurice blandly. “You called to ask me to explain a line in Act Two of
The Willowhunters
.”

“— And it had gone,” said Innes stiffly.

“Di,” I said. “I suppose. Did she come and visit you, Maurice?” I had a vision of Di next morning at Renati’s, drifting over and embracing Johnson. And another, too late, of something Johnson had told me already, in the Hotel Quirinale one evening.

“She always comes to see me in the morning,” said Maurice.

“Came,” he corrected himself. For a moment, as he studied the end of his cigar, his expression was less than regal. Then he looked up and drawled, his voice bright with malice, “So they tricked you, dear boy, into going to the balloon seller’s flat? How you must have surprised Di with your Dardick.”

“I suppose I did,” Innes said. He sounded undeniably sulky. “It was, of course, merely a device to throw suspicion on someone else. They did not know who I was at that time.”

“More fool they,” Johnson said. Under the glasses, his bruises were turning crimson and purple but his pipe continued to burn with even placidity, and you would almost have said he was enjoying it. “Of course, after all the fun in the Corso and the photographing of Mr. Paladrini they couldn’t afford to let him live. They killed him and faked the suicide note, and cleared the flat in a hell of a hurry. In so much hurry that they missed the fish with the Capri date on it. Then Di or a friend switched the gas cylinders. It was easy. Ruth was off duty after midnight on the Wednesday.”

I thought of Di switching the gas cylinders and then tried not to think of it. I said, “They forgot something else. They forgot the list you found, with the dates in Ischia and Lipari and Taormina.”

“Ah,” said Professor Hathaway. “Now I find this of extreme interest. You have just mentioned the route followed by
Dolly
?”

Johnson didn’t say anything nor did he look at me. I looked at Charles. “Yes,” I said. “Well. We didn’t tell you. But there was a timetable in Mr, Paladrini’s flat which implied that the Capri date was the last of a whole series of meetings. Johnson thought we ought to pursue it. But nothing happened.”

Professor Hathaway said, “I wonder why nothing happened?”

“Because I faked the list,” replied Johnson mildly. He cleared a space in the smoke with his hand and looked with some concern at Innes, who had doubled up, sneezing and coughing. I said, “I think after the gas…”

“Dear me. Of course, how thoughtless,” Maurice said smoothly. “Johnson, put out your furnace. Do I understand the whole cruise on
Dolly
was a whimsy? Not that I am complaining. Your company and that of your friends was delightful. But the Tyrrhenian Sea in November… You have not been kind to Jacko.”

Nobody had been kind to Jacko. I think it was the first time it struck me, so self-centered had I become, that the person who must be suffering most from all this was Jacko. Retired in his chair, silent against the twitching wall panel, he had spoken to no one since he kissed me. It didn’t need much effort of the imagination to know what he must be feeling. He had loved Diana. Really loved her. And she had merely employed him.

“I apologize,” Johnson said, “to Jacko and to anyone else who may have regretted the voyage. But I did have a purpose, and that was to transport anyone who showed signs of wishing to attend the only assignation on that cruise which was genuine. The meeting in the San Michele Villa on Capri.”

“Which I attended?” said Maurice richly. “Timothy, you are being parsimonious with the brandy. I wish to mark the occasion when I outguessed a member — you are a member, I understand? — of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” He drew on his cigar and then, resting his smoking hand on the chair arm, smiled at us all with that fine actor’s smile, unchanging, timeless and triumphant.

“You argued,” he said, “rightly — let us give you all credit, with perspicacity — that no one in our presence would attend such a meeting. You argued that all the persons you suspected had, however, an excuse to pay one visit at least to the villa. So, you argued, the person with information to sell might quite possibly leave a message for the person intending to buy it. Hence your appearance with dear Ruth in advance of your party. Only it happened… It happened to those of us with experience of life, that another possibility presented itself.”

“What?” said Jacko baldly. Maurice cast him a look of melancholy dislike.

“Human nature,” he said, “is the dramatist’s business. One rounds one’s characters. One studies how they should behave. I felt Sophia Lindrop was behaving…” He hesitated. “…
theatrically
.”

“So?” said Charles. I remembered he had been engaged to Sophia, and the things she had said to him on the quay, leaving
Sappho
.

“So I followed her,” said Maurice mildly, “to the barber’s. She was having her hair done in the feminine quarters. She didn’t see me, but it was quite possible to watch what she was doing. And that, of course, was talking to Diana Minicucci.”

“They were friends,” Professor Hathaway said. “At least —”

“At least,” I said, “Di appeared to put up with her, but most certainly gave her a ducking in Taormina. It put me off the scent, I can tell you. Maurice, what were they talking about?”

“Now that,” said Maurice regretfully, “I couldn’t tell you. But I can say the subject was distasteful. Sophia was plainly angry and Diana, after listening, became angry as well. In addition, something was passed to Diana. She studied it for a moment, and then tore it up. I was interested,” said Maurice calmly, “and my barber was kind enough to save me the fragments. You saw them. A small piece of film of no significance.”

The pebble glasses of Professor Hathaway were trained on the pink face of Maurice. “Hence the anger,” said Lilian Hathaway slowly. “Both Sophia and Diana expected something different. What? There can be only one answer. The material which was concealed in the Baedeker.”

Charles said, “Or Ruth’s roll of film. It had disappeared, remember. Innes was looking for it. And Ruth, sweetie, you’re a hell of a liar. Even Johnson knew bloody well you hadn’t burned it.”

“No,” said Professor Hathaway. “That was a roll of film. This was a single negative. Large enough, when shot on an eight-millimeter camera, to encompass several pages of manuscript. And small enough to slip within the binding of a Baedeker.” She turned her lean, adenoidal face upon Johnson, and Johnson, lying back, met her regard without flinching. “What Sophia had obtained was not what she had expected. Who, then, had substituted one film for the other?”