Johnson-Johnson 06 – Dolly and the Nanny Bird (7 page)

Missy’s Golden American Wonderland is one hour due west from Manhattan for adults. For carsick children it stretches to an hour and a half or even two hours away.

Johnson’s hired Mercedes-Benz was the size of a bus and had everything: child-proof locks, automatic windows and compulsory seatbelts without which the dashboard apostrophised you in green but wouldn’t start up the engine. It arrived at the brownstone with Denny Donovan sitting grinning by Johnson, which left me to get into the back, along with the four junior Mallards, the two junior Eisenkopps, Charlotte and Bunty.

It was a foregone conclusion that Bunty would bring the baby on an all-day fun fair excursion: if she didn’t it would rank as a day off. Sukey, in a carrycot with the hood and the apron both clipped, was asleep in a dark, satisfactory fug, and long might she remain so.

Grover, full of Tootsie Rolls, grits and tinned apricot, was wearing a pattern-matched shirt and sweater from Sandpiper, while the four Ducklings, predictably, were full of Freakies and dressed by Marks and Sparks from their skins to their anoraks.

I asked Donovan if he was a plant doctor and he said Sure, he thought everyone knew, and did I need any help.

Charlotte asked Johnson what he had for breakfast and he said Hanky-Panky, the Nifty Goodie
(A little Hanky-Panky will Brighten your Day)
.

Donovan slapped him on the back and the Mercedes shot across three lanes and back again, causing the youngest Mallard to belch. There followed the first of our many stops by the wayside.

Nothing got out of hand, because Charlotte and I were there, moving into the accustomed routine with Kleenex and sick bags and damp sponges and towels and barley sugar. We sang the usual songs and played the usual games and, in the intervals of coping with the four little Mallards and Grover, listened to Bunty’s mesmerising account of Comer’s plastic sprayed teeth and the Chow Chow’s flea collar, and the poodle’s doggy bootees, and Beverley’s Wig’n Lift, the hairpiece for hitching the chins up.

Hygiene and after-care in the Eisenkopp household seemed to embrace just about everything except Bunty, who reeked of Balenciaga’s Ho Hang and wore platform shoes this time with her uniform gaberdine trench coat. Donovan was attired in a fairway cap with his Alaskan Timberwolf which made Charlie, sitting behind him, look like a gas inspector.

She was the only one in Maggie Bee uniform, since I wasn’t on duty. I think she rather enjoyed it, even when we plunged in among the flags and the lights of the Wonderland and the parking attendants converged, dressed as animals. We bought a ticket from one, with
Saggy Baggy Elephant
written out under his trunk. Julia, the youngest Mallard, burst into tears. We all got out of the car and Charlotte opened her bag and began handing out little blue badges.

There were a score in her bag, made of thin pale blue tin with a clip, and the words M.M.A. printed on them. I said, ‘What’s the idea?’ as she started pinning them on coats and jerseys. Julia stopped crying and Grover got two.

‘Reconstruction,’ said Charlotte succinctly. She handed one to Bunty, who had unbuttoned Sukey’s pram apron to check that she was breathing, and was buttoning it up again. ‘Remember the kidnap note you found in your pocket?
Shoot it out
and
Wear an M.M.A. badge
? And an arrow next to The Great Shoot-Out?’

‘Vaguely,’ I said. I was incensed. I knew they knew all about it, but they needn’t have taken it over. I said, ‘I don’t really see the point. The kidnap failed. The note was never acted on. The kidnapper didn’t come back to the stall. Rudi Klapper. The man we saw in the Carl Schurz Park. The police told us that. After he tried the snatch, he didn’t come back to the Shoot-out.’

‘Then it won’t do any good,’ said Bunty cheerfully. She had fitted Sukey’s carrycot on to its wheels and was leaning on it. ‘But it can’t do any harm either. Come on. You’re at your auntie’s. God, who’d like a hot dog? I’m famished.’

Johnson locked the car and we set off.

Missy’s Golden American Wonderland is a large wooded park, set out as a pleasureland for kids of all sizes squired as needed by friends, parents and sometimes the Haitian help, down at heel on seventy dollars a week because behind every Haitian help is a Haitian lady on a percentage.

It is not a place haunted by English nannies with toddlers. It gives that sense of illicit excitement one gets parking a pram outside Woolworth’s, when one is meant to be out for a health-giving bash through the Common.

Not that we saw all that much to begin with. Flinging down dollar bills, we were sucked through the entrance and propelled past stalls, bandstands, pavilions, big wheel, roller coaster, arena and an assortment of aerial networks by Bunty’s sixth sense for hot dogs, which would be worth a fortune in Perigord. Then full of chippolata sausage and mustard the nine of us, pushing Sukey, proceeded to test our digestions.

You’d expect an ice hockey buff to go for speed, but it wasn’t till I saw Johnson upside down on the Great Whirling Moon Ride or with his spectacles glued to his face in the Amazing Centrifugal Saucer that I remembered that yachtsmen have strong stomachs also. Bunty went on everything as well. Side by side, Charlotte and I pushed Sukey and carried Grover and led the four little Mallards through the train rides and into the mouse circus and in and out of the distorting mirrors while engines of death hurtled above us, full of Alaskan fur and Afro hair-do and spectacles.

Neither of us, I suppose, really minded. I liked Charlie’s four little girls and so did Grover, who had a nice healthy scar where his hand had been cut but the same cough, along with incipient dandruff. He moved up while I was toting a Mallard and said, ‘You need to walk aside Jonah,’ meaning me, and stayed firmly attached until Charlie took over the Mallard and I acquired Sukey’s vehicle, whereupon he tried to climb in, kicking Sukey sharply.

It had struck me he might. I whisked him out before his feet hit the blankets and jacked him instead on my shoulders. ‘And so,’ said Charlie, ‘they leave home and land at a head-shrinker’s. What should we advise Bunty to do?’

‘Shoot either or both of the parents,’ I said. We were halfway between the Kremlin and the Amsterdam waterfront in the Garden of Miniature Masterpieces. A bald head, stirring, rose like a harvest moon from behind the onion domes of the Cathedral of the Annunciation and the owner, stepping carefully, crossed the Red Square and stood, gazing through his long-lashed soft eyes, directly in front of us.

Booted, dimpled and inconvenient, it was Hugo Panadek, Comer Eisenkopp’s Design Director. He had gold rings in both ears and a wolf-smile under the bush on his lip. Indeed, he looked quite different out of gorilla-skin. He said, ‘So. You would shoot either or both of the parents!’

‘To Hugo!’ screamed Grover. I set him down and he rushed straight off the path and into the Adriatic. It only came to his ankles and he was out of earshot, so I left him.

‘Of course,’ I said to Hugo. I kept my voice mild. ‘Don’t you know it’s every trained nurse’s dream, a world full of well-mannered kids and no adults? Do you know Charlotte Medleycott?’

One soft eye turned to Charlie, who was grinning. ‘You have been to Data-Mate again,’ said Hugo Panadek accusingly. ‘Every time she comes to the Eisenkopps, it is to say that she has run through another eight boy friends. Who is it this time?’

I looked up in the air, in all directions. ‘Over there,’ I said. ‘Inside the Alaskan Timberwolf. I’ve got him second-hand, actually, at the moment. What is it that compels bachelors to jump into fur suits this season?’

The company,’ said Hugo. ‘Sometimes the company, alas, is too chilly. Nurse Joanna, what do you do in the evenings? ’

I said, ‘Lift bachelors out of their furry suits and unpin their diapers. Do you come here a lot?’ Grover was attempting to scale a papier mâché range of mountains. I rescued him. The castle on the top, of the Mad Ludwig variety, had its windows lit and a plastic dragon endlessly breasting the waterfilled ring of the moat.

A discarded banana stick impeded its progress and Hugo, reaching over, removed it tenderly, and inspected its working parts. ‘The real dragon,’ he said, ‘is ten feet long.’

‘And fire,’ said Grover.

‘And has fire in its mouth. The real moat…’

‘Is a whimming place,’ Grover said. ‘Hugo whim there.’

‘In his fur monkey suit?’ I said. I could feel my bland slipping.

‘In my part of the world,’ said Hugo Panadek, ‘you don’t need a suit to go swimming in. Read the notice. It is a real castle. The fortress of Kalk, Yugoslavia. Owner, Hugo Panadek.’

‘I wouldn’t have believed Hugo, but I believed Grover all right. Grover knew all about Hugo’s castle, and so I suppose did Bunty, corkscrewing presently round a sloping platform in Johnson’s arms. I said, ‘Well, congratulations. It must be famous, to appear in Missy’s Golden American Wonderland, yet. Did you have to supply the blueprints?’

‘This is no trouble,’ said Hugo. ‘I design for a living.’ He waved a hand. ‘I design the Wonderland.’

Charlie scraped a couple of Mallards off the Acropolis. ‘You mean you’re
Missy
?’ She stood, her arms full of kids and her end-curls sticking out at the side like demented butterfly wings, showing him thirty-two perfect teeth in her ecstasy. ‘You’re Missy, Hugo?’

‘You want proof? ’ Hugo said, his lashes descending. ‘Well, I have enough shares of Missy to be able to show friends a good time, let us say. Where is Bunty? What do you all wish to see?’

That was when I remembered the time, and what we were all supposed to be there for. ‘The Great Shoot-Out,’ I said. ‘We’re supposed to be doing a reconstruction of Benedict’s kidnapping, or at least of what the kidnapper planned to do afterwards. He’d been working beforehand at The Great Shoot-Out.’

‘Oh, I remember all that,’ said Hugo. The Carl Schurz Park. The police came and grilled Bunty and did a conducted tour of the johns. It sounded like the worst-organised heist of all time. No wonder the Great Shoot-Out has been losing money. If you pardon my curiosity, what do you think you will find that the cops didn’t? ’

‘Ask Bunty,’ said Charlie. ‘Here she comes. Bunty, what are we hoping to find that the cops couldn’t?’

‘I believe,’ said Bunty weakly, ‘in P.P.S. Holy Jesus, that was a bitch.’ She lurched, and the Data-Mate hitched her under the arm, without speaking.

‘E.S.P.,’ said Johnson kindly. ‘You shouldn’t go on these things if you haven’t a strong stomach. Ask the gentleman with the earrings where the powder room is.’

‘Johnson,’ I said, ‘let me introduce the designer of Missy’s Golden American Wonderland. His name’s Hugo Panadek. That’s his castle over there.’

Johnson turned. The dragon droned round the moat. He watched it critically. ‘You can’t,’ he said, ‘do much entertaining?’

‘I get it,’ said Hugo. ‘You’re Charlie’s newest Data-Mate. Jeeze, that computer’s a bum.’

They stared amiably at one another. With no change of tone Hugo added, ‘Glad to meetya. I hear Rosamund’s psyched out of her skull with the oilpainting. What’s the slumming for?’

‘It seems to be a benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m not complaining,’ said Johnson. ‘We’ve finished, really, except for watching Bunty’s P.P.S. operate.’

Hugo Panadek grinned. The flashing teeth, the lashes, the dimples all confirmed the first, magnetic impact he’d made at Bunty’s flat. He surveyed the kids and flung out his arms. ‘The Great Shoot-Out,’ he said. ‘And then steak’n French Fries and ice cream all round. Fudge ice cream. Maple walnut ice cream. Butter Brickie ice cream. Chocnut and Pineapple and Mint and Chocolate Chips…’

The Mallard girls were all squealing with joy and I saw in Charlie’s eye a reflection of my own simple juvenile greed. It was Bunty who said, ‘Do you mind? My stomach’s still wrapped round my tonsils,’ and led the way, behind Hugo, to the shooting stall.

Having no sons, my father taught me to shoot. I brought down my first pheasant at twelve, and parted from blood sports at fifteen, but I’ve always kept a soft spot for funfairs.

You could say I’d shot all over the world, from target practice at a pound for two bullets in Russia, to flying monsters in Paris, to activated comedy popups in Tivoli. Lead me to Madame Tussaud’s and there I’ll be in the fun parlour, mowing down planes in an airfield.

The Great Shoot-Out had none of that kid stuff. Four guns were trained on four cut-out Mid-Western town backdrops through which, on an endless belt, cattle rustlers appeared and vanished. You got a second to shoot and reload. Six out of six rustlers got you a free replay. Three free replays, if your loading arm hadn’t broken, got you a woolly bear to take back to mother. There was another twist. If you shot a rustler and missed, he shot back at you. With a bang and a little red light. I kid you not.

Charlie tried first, and it shocked her at any rate. At the first burst of counterfeit counter-fire, she flung herself back on the pram and woke Sukey, who started to yell, in competition with the stallholder, a large Greek with black curly hair, who was explaining tetchily that all the explosions were totally harmless. But Charlie’s nerve had expired, and she fired her five other shots without winging a rustler; though they didn’t get her actually, either.

The Data-Mate, stepping up casually, killed all the rustlers, got a free reload, killed them again, and then got overconfident and missed the one that dodged out through the bar-flaps.

Johnson shot and made a hash of it.

I had an unfair advantage, through standing there watching the sequences. I got the one on the jail roof, the one through the bar-flaps, the one through the hotel window and the one who jumped out the waterbutt. I waited, and got the one who peeked out of the stable door. The last one jumped from a Wells Fargo van and I got him right through the heart.

Hugo kissed me with fervour and Grover said, ‘You bang the guns this time.’ I offered the rifle to Bunty, who turned it back.

‘Don’t be mad, you’ve got a free shot. Go on. Hell, we only shot policemen in Liverpool.’

They all said go on, so I did it again.

This time Donovan, Hugo and Grover all kissed me, while the stall-owner snatched back the gun and broke it as if he planned never to use it again. Then he handed me over my bear.