Split Code (12 page)

‘So am I,’ Johnson said, ‘I was wondering if you’d seen him. The man waiting for Rudi was Vladimir, your launderette Ukrainian from Winnipeg.’

Whatever they did to the Booker-Readmans, the kidnap demands got me into a tangle.

Arriving home from Missy’s Golden American Wonderland I wasn’t interested in anything or anybody but checking to see if Ben was in good running order. I lurched creaking up the stairs like a blackcurrant straddle harvester and barely noticed that Simon and Rosamund were engaged in the preliminary bouts of a magnificent spat. The words ‘Your pathetic Kraut’ rose to the surface several times, and after I had checked that my brat was safely asleep I slung my things off and went and had a good listen.

If I thought it was going to be about my call from Hugo’s office about the threat to their son, I was out in my reckoning. They were discussing Comer Eisenkopp’s invitation to spend Easter with them at Cape Cod.

Simon saw no harm in going and Rosamund thought he was out of his tiny mind, to put himself under an obligation to these people. Simon said it was pathetic Krauts like that who kept her mother going, and Rosamund said that if Comer and Beverley Eisenkopp thought they were going to get an invitation to the gala in Venice, they were going to be bloody disappointed. To which Simon replied that invitations to Warr Beckenstaff galas were Warr Beckenstaff business, and since when had her mother paid the slightest attention to anything her darling daughter said or did, except to do her level best to keep her from marrying anything less than a duke, until she had to get herself in pig.

‘Well put,’ said Rosamund bitterly. ‘I bloody nearly did have to do it myself. And now look what’s happening. Some hoodlum snatches her grandson, and there’s Grandmother’s fortune, gone for nothing.’

‘She won’t pay, darling,’ said Simon. ‘You’re quite safe. They’ll kill the boy next time and you can take Joanna on as your social secretary. However will they get their jollies at the Long Island Cerebral Palsy Fair without you?’

‘Don’t knock it. It does wonders for your image, Simon, if you’ll forgive the expression,’ Rosamund said. ‘On the other hand, helping the underprivileged has never been your thing, has it? If someone destroyed your looks tomorrow, what would you do? What
would
you do? Do you ever think of it?’

‘You mean you’d stop loving me?’ Simon said, and laughed. ‘My word, I can’t think what I’d do, darling. Or yes, I can. I think I’d have to run to Grandma for help.’

There was a little silence. Then Rosamund, in a voice drawling with rage said, ‘Of course you must do as you like. Don’t fail to explain, while you’re about it, how the Lesnovo ikon came to be smashed in the Eisenkopps’ bog.’

‘What?’ said Simon.

‘You’re so quick, darling,’ Rosamund said. ‘Joanna the paragon found it, along with Bunty Cole and God knows who else. Joanna brought it here because they thought it might be the lost ikon.’

‘And?’ said Simon. His voice had weakened.

‘And I said it wasn’t, and burned it. It was a rotten copy, even for you. I shan’t ask the obvious question.’

‘You might as well. You’ll get the obvious answer,’ said Simon Booker-Readman. ‘I’ve no idea how it got there. Probably one of the children.’

‘Benedict?’ said Rosamund scathingly.

It couldn’t have been telepathy. But as Rosamund mentioned his name Benedict woke, and finding himself wet and unhappy and hungry, broadcast the fact, without delay, through the baby alarm. The sitting-room door opened and Rosamund came out.

I was three steps back, on the last tread of the stair when she saw me. I said, ‘I’ll see to it, Mrs Booker-Readman. I was just coming down to tell you I was in.’

Rosamund stood perfectly still. Below her long face and incurving hair everything was in the severest good taste: her cardigan, her ombre striped silk blouse, her wrap-around skirt and good shoes. She said, ‘I should rather like you to come and see me the moment you get in, Joanna. One likes to know just how many people are in one’s house at any moment.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to make sure Benedict was all right.’

‘I’m sure I don’t know how we manage without you,’ Rosamund said. ‘But he seems to have survived. We had a call from the police. Thanks to Mr Panadek, they found the getaway cars.’

The crying intensified. I had one foot on the upper step, but I took it down. ‘Cars? In the plural?’ I said. Hugo’s vigil with Donovan in the Sky Ride had paid off.

‘A Dodge, and another car with some sort of fancy elephant costume in it. They assumed a third car was waiting to take the three men away. The police think it was another kidnapping attempt which didn’t come off, since you didn’t take Benedict with you.’

‘Take Benedict to a fun fair? They must be crazy,’ I said. ‘But economical, at that. They could use the bear message twice.’

‘Sukey was taken,’ Rosamund pointed out. There was no sign of Simon. If she wondered what I’d heard of their conversation, it didn’t show in her manner, which was coolly non-affable, as usual. She said, ‘The police have advised us to get a bodyguard, and this we shall probably have to do. In the meantime, Benedict is not to go out. Do you understand?’

I understood. I was not to gossip in parks with other interested elements of the network. And Grandmother’s money was to be preserved as well as might be for better ends than paying Benedict’s blackmailers. I ran upstairs and picked up Benedict, who was crying real, glistening tears. Then he saw it was me, and delivered a chinless smile and I said, ‘Benedict Booker-Readman, you represent unpleasant, menial work with unsocial hours, and I am not going to get hooked on someone else’s incontinent bastard.’

He lay on my lap by the wash basin, his head turned to watch all my movements, and smiled, and cooed like a pigeon. It isn’t fair. It’s my last brat. I’m going to leave the profession. I’m going to turn into an old, unmarried lady who keeps retired cart horses.

The next day, Simon appointed his personal strongman for Benedict. It turned out to be Denny Donovan, which wasn’t too surprising, since he knew the job was going, I suppose, before most people. They gave him a room in the attic, and he moved in from his digs with a sleeping-bag, a moisture gauge, a light meter, some insecticide, an old army revolver and a can of liquid banana. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have employed him. But he was hefty, and willing, and cheap, and no doubt was expected to keep my mind off everything that wasn’t business.

Certainly, he was a revelation on the subject of plant doctoring. He had, he said, majored in fiddle leaf figs and was now fully qualified to make house to house calls including treatment and surgery. He could hold discussion groups for troubled plants and open clinics and sell records to grow them by. He was saving for a sunray lamp for a sick Mottled Bigleaf Periwinkle. It was so fascinating I was quite surprised when he mentioned the Wonderland, and observed that one of the getaway cars had been traced to a private parking lot belonging to Madison Square Garden.

It had been stolen, he said, the previous day, and from an area virtually inaccessible to the public. Which made it look as if Rudi Klapper, or the man I knew as Vladimir, or the unknown inside the elephant outfit, or even all three, may have had showbiz connections beyond the scope of Missy’s Golden American Wonderland.

It seemed weak-minded to me, to steal a car from your own car park instead of a public one. But on the other hand, but for Hugo and Donovan’s sky spotting, the getaway cars would probably never have been found.

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘There’s to be a parade of Madison Square Garden employees wearing Saggy Baggy Elephant suits and pushing trash cans.’

‘Nope,’ said my ice hockey king, continuing with his current task, which was erecting illicit shelving. ‘They reckon that someone’s still hoping to entice Benedict out of the house, and that some time you’ll be sent a couple of tickets for a kids’ show. Meanwhile, the fuzz are making like they know nothing of it.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Denny, Benedict is
nine weeks old.’

‘Well,’ said Donovan. ‘It’s not all boxing at the Garden. They put on other things.’

‘No?’ I said. ‘He won’t stir out of his pram unless it’s a strip show.’

Donovan thought. ‘Well, if I don’t know what a kid that age wants, I guess they don’t know either. Hey, d’you know Mrs Booker-Readman’s Busy Lizzie’s got greenfly?’

I let it pass. As far as I was concerned, it was just a redress of the Balance of Nature. But two days later, I remembered that conversation when the Brazilian daily came in with a note from the Eisenkopps.

It was for me, from Grandfather Eisenkopp. In it, he said that he and Grover thought I would like one of the great American experiences. Enclosed therefore were four tickets for the forthcoming Okmulgee World Championship Rodeo at Madison Square Garden, and he hoped I would use them, whether to take kids or my own friends on an evening off. Yours truly, Elijah Eisenkopp.

‘There you are,’ I said to Donovan. ‘The Eisenkopp fortune has nothing to do with their toy empire. It is founded on kidnapping. A Prussian branch of Mafia. Grandpa Eisenkopp is only bedridden because he got a low sabre-cut at a christening. He could have planned it. He knew how and when I was going with Bunty to Missy’s Golden American Wonderland.’

‘If he did, he also knew you were going without the baby,’ remarked my plant doctor.

He was not stupid, that fellow. Not entirely stupid, anyway. He phoned the police, and then he phoned Charlotte, who broke the news to Mrs Mallard that two nights hence she was expected to look after her own four kids and Benedict Booker-Readman for an entire evening.

No one told her the reason. On police advice, the Booker-Readmans and I were all going to the Okmulgee World Championship Rodeo with Benedict’s carrycot and a dummy inside.

I had heard of more original and even more sensible suggestions. but I was far from objecting to any device which might lead to nabbing our elephant friend or Klapper, or Vladimir. Or at the very least, a bareback Texas cowpoke for Charlotte.

I wondered, after his burst of participation at the Wonderland, if Johnson would phone me in the next couple of days, if only to say he was glad to have known me. He didn’t. A boyfriend of Charlotte’s knew someone who’d been to a dinner party he’d given at the New York Yacht Club, and someone else’s employer came home stoned from another at the Harvard Club at which Johnson had been principal guest. He had at least one sitting from Rosamund and two others that I knew of from Philly socialites. He was playing hard to get. So I went to the Rodeo on the strength of the only real piece of advice the Department had bothered to give me:
agree to everything.

There are nineteen thousand raked seats round the big bran ring in Madison Square Garden, and the first person I saw down by the barrier was Gramps Eisenkopp in his sonic wheelchair. He was waving. An eighteen-year-old redhead in an Indian brow- band and braids sitting on the arm of his chair waved as well, giggling, and half the stadium waved back, hoping to make her neckline move half an inch to the right. Rosamund said, ‘My God.’

Simon said, ‘I think you should sympathize, darling. Imagine living in the same house as Comer with nothing but backnumbers of Rogue and Dude and Nugget to keep you going.’ He pulled down his shirt cuffs under the Dunhill hopsack blazer and leaned back in his orange seat. Rosamund was also dressed for the wananchi in a jersey print with a tie-hankie on her hair, and kept knocking the carrycot with her elbow.

Eventually, I transferred it to my other side, next to the passageway. where it could be attacked more easily. Denny Donovan, who came in a bit later with Charlotte, leaned over the loge steps and cooed winningly at the wrapped shape of the china doll, before settling down across the passage. Charlotte in cheesecloth with oasis-green eye-shadow, peered under the hood and gave an even more realistic flinch. ‘I’m sorry to tell you, he needs changing, Jo. Want me to do it?’

Surrounded by hate from the adjoining spectators I said, ‘You won’t notice it when the cattle come on.’

There were two detectives behind us. I supposed there might be others, watching. I wondered if any of the Department’s men were about. In all the recent upheavals, I had never come across any. And tonight I wanted support, for I didn’t know what to expect. Nothing was going according to expectations. No one had attacked me. No one had laid a finger on me, even at Missy’s American Wonderland, with three accredited villains in the offing. Only Benedict had been threatened, in terms I couldn’t forget:
Mr and Mrs Booker-Readman, I have your son. He is nailed in a box, without food and drink . . .

I had said to Simon in the cab, with the china doll in its box on my knees, ‘What if it’s a trick? What if it’s a plot to get Benedict out of the way while Donovan and the rest of us are sitting like fools at the Rodeo?’

‘Really, Joanna,’ had said Rosamund. ‘The police did think of that. They’ll leave a plain-clothes man with Mrs Mallard. Obviously, we have to have Donovan here, to convince people we’re bringing the baby.’

Obviously. Down in the front, Gramps Eisenkopp turned round again, flapping a stetson, which he rammed on his head, grinning. His black wig, shifting a little, peered over his brow, but his broad, thin-lipped grin stayed unaltered. Charlotte, leaning over her Data-Mate, said, ‘He used to ride in the Cow Palace rodeos when he was young. Would you believe it? Bunty told me.’

‘Jeeze. Hence the Buckle Bunnies,’ said Donovan, interested. Pocahontas had been joined by two girls in curled hats and pointed lizard-skin boots and pink slip-ware faces. Rodeo groupies usually hung about behind the scenes, waiting for the best- looking bull riders. No one could call Grandpa Eisenkopp good- looking, but who cared, with those financial resources? I wondered what the socially sensitive Comer and his gorgeous Beverley thought of Grandpa’s hick past. If you believed Hugo, the brainstorm which removed him from active life had reached his relatives as one of the minor blessings from Providence.

I also understood why no one had been allowed to bring Grover.