Dolly and the Bird of Paradise - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 01 (32 page)

His bald head always made you think he was old, but he walked and ran and everything like a dancer. And was good at kissing. And would take No for an answer, after a struggle.

He had a revolver, and his back to the door.

‘What a shame,’ he said. ‘It was such a nice,
well-paying
business. I mean, sexy flowers are all very well, but it palls.

‘Natalie, hang on to that girl. She’s got your nose licked.

‘Maggie, you’ve got a technique worth millions. Stop showing it to millions.

‘Rita, my Scotch Bird of Paradise, don’t trust anybody. Especially not that low-geared, witty, implacable bastard, my friend over there…

‘Goodbye, J.J. It’s been nice knowing you, but expensive. If Frances Emerson hadn’t offered me your studio, I suppose I’d be a millionaire and you’d be wining and dining, a drunken self-pitying ruin, in some expensive harbour on
Dolly
…

‘Actually,’ Ferdy said, ‘I’m sorry about
Dolly
. I hope that collection of wogs has duly been crucified. They weren’t meant to wreck your little ship. Or lose their tempers with you. Or bloody lose the place and drill me instead of one of the others… You knew, I suppose, from the way that they kicked you, that someone close to you was behind it.’

‘Yes,’ said Johnson. He had pulled himself upright. He was full in the sights of Ferdy’s revolver.

Ferdy said, ‘Once you would have paid me to do this.’

I didn’t know what he meant, but I saw Raymond’s face, and the fear on it.

Johnson said, ‘Actually, no. But as you say, we both go back a long time. So it’s your choice. Gold watch for long service.’

There was a silence. No one moved. No one spoke.

Then Ferdy said, ‘You’re a bloody unfair bastard. I ought to take you at your word. Tell your little bottom-wipers there not to trust you. That this is what you do. That this is why you live while everyone else round about you gets theirs…

‘Have yourself a good time, my dear friend Johnson Johnson,’ said Ferdy, with a sudden, terrible smile. ‘For tonight, sure as death, I am enlarging your scope for you.’

He waved with his gun, and went; and Raymond, starting to his feet, dropped into his chair again after one brittle glance from the Owner.

A moment later, we heard the gun fire.

Natalie said, ‘You knew he would do that? How did you know?’

‘Sexual strategy of bloody human beings,’ Maggie said. She was crying. ‘And it bloody stinks.’

An hour or two after that, a car came to take Natalie and Dodo to a hotel, from which they were to fly to Miami as soon as the airport opened in the morning.

Fred Gluttenmacher, comfortably asleep all night on board the
Paramount Princess
and, apart from three hookers, the sole object of attention of its entire crew since the storm began, was to join her there and fly with her, discussing on the way what to do about replacing the co-producer of
Josephine
.

Before that, both Natalie and Dodo had been subjected to a short pep-talk by a senior police representative, in which I gathered it was made clear that, there being some sensitive areas on both sides of the case, if she didn’t publicise theirs, they wouldn’t publicise hers.

Or so Johnson said. He was there while Natalie said goodbye to me.

She still didn’t care for me, but her computer-brain, which had hardly registered me except, as Ferdy had dog-nosed, as a show-piccaninny, was full of relevant information now.

She had seen both my cropped hair and my wig. No doubt she drew her own conclusions. She knew about my link with the Curtises, but also that the authorities, for their own reasons, would rather it didn’t get about.

She had promised to keep it quiet, and I thought she would. Natalie never gossiped. She had enough power. She didn’t need to.

She had style, as well. She would have offered me that post again, if I had wanted it. The post Kim-Jim wanted me to have, that she thought was above me. The work on the film that she’d passed to Clive Curtis.

She didn’t, for the opposite reason. I didn’t like her, but I appreciated that. And I wished her well for her film, although I wouldn’t go to see it.

At the last moment, Amy found Porter on the floor, and loaded him into the car as well, with the consent of the police. Tomorrow, the hangover and the funeral arrangements. The next day, not even Porter knew what.

Everything hurt. Thinking hurt. Raymond, Maggie and Johnson, deep in their chairs, didn’t talk even to each other and neither did Amy, treading heavy-footed among us, preparing to send us to bed.

When she took the parrot out, I said, ‘Will you keep Cohn?’

She looked at Johnson.

He looked weary to death. He said, ‘It isn’t Cohn.’

I should have known, if I’d thought. I said, ‘Amy trained it?’

It would have been easy. All they needed to do was tape the real Cohn, and play it over and over for one of Amy’s St. Lucians.

They could even have put together, from Kim-Jim’s tapes, a duplicate of those last words he was supposed to have spoken to Ferdy. And hearing them, Ferdy would assume he was trapped.

Raymond had been at Faflick’s in England, as I had been. Maybe spying on me. Maybe because Johnson had spotted, as I had spotted, that the parrot had something to do with the time Kim-Jim died.

Because two rings of the telephone must have been a signal, not a call which Kim-Jim answered. The telephone was not beside his chair. With the telly on, it would have taken him the length of at least one ring to hear it.

And by the time he switched the telly off and got to the phone, there would have been several rings more.

But I hadn’t known that it was Ferdy the alibi was for.

Ferdy, who had been a victim, as I had, of the sledge-run, and who had barely escaped with his life on board
Dolly
.

But who had killed Kim-Jim, it seemed. Who was the man I had sworn to follow and find. Whose death, by his own hand, was in the end worse than the death of my own father and sister, because still, in my mind, he was my joyous friend, of whom I was proud.

How can you know whom to trust?

I fell asleep, and got covered up somehow. Much later, a voice I had heard somewhere before said, ‘Don’t wake her. Ah, she’s stirring. Let’s have a look, then.’

It was daylight. ‘Well, young lady,’ said a man I had certainly seen somewhere before. ‘You seem to be making very good progress. Just let me look at this shoulder once more.’

Henry. Henry, the well-mannered doctor who had dropped into the Owner’s flat, and discussed Bessie. Whose depth-charges had been mentioned only yesterday.

He had on an open-necked holiday shirt, showing a lot of new suntan, and was peering at my various dressings. I said, ‘You patched me up yesterday?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Not much rumoured abroad, you know. I’m on holiday round the coast.’

‘What a coincidence,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘Why not? And if there’s some valuable property around that people want an eye kept on, then why not, again?’

He replaced the bandages. ‘That won’t even leave a scar. I’ll write you a prescription. I expect you’d like to get home pretty soon, anyway.’

I said, ‘You strapped up Mr Johnson, then? How is he?’

‘Remarkable,’ Henry said. ‘Remarkable, considering. Nothing that a little embroidery here and there won’t put to rights. He’s flying back as soon as possible, I’m glad to say. A week in hospital, or two, and he’ll be walking around. A limit to what drugs can do. Ah, there you are.’

‘Yes,’ said Johnson. ‘Fully paid-up member of the Friendly Burial Society. Goodbye, Henry, and thank you.

‘Rita, I am sending you to the airport in half an hour, and in twelve hours you will be in London. A grateful government will provide you with any accommodation you want, or Maggie would be happy to share with you, or you may have friends of your own whom you would prefer to stay with anyway. Or go to Troon or Glasgow. Which?’

Henry had gone out of the room. I looked at Johnson the way he was without his drugs and said, ‘I’d rather stay with friends. Thank you. My luggage is in… is in Ferdy’s house.’

‘It’s being collected,’ Johnson said. ‘Amy and the others are sleeping. I’ll say goodbye for you. Also, I wouldn’t presume to fix you up with a job, but the American film project you were interested in is still open, and you could always ring them.’

The information ran to a stop. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m trying to sort out your life in what feels like the middle of a quadruple bypass. If Connie rings you in a couple of weeks, will you come and let me talk to you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Look, forget about me. You don’t owe me anything.’

‘It’s been the Fun Bus for Under-Fives. I know,’ said Johnson. ‘See you in London. Why hang about? The St Lucia Rotary Club rang this morning to bloody cancel my lecture.’

Three weeks later, I lifted the phone in London and heard the voice of Connise Margate, Johnson’s housekeeper, asking me to go to Flat 17
b
again.

In between, I hadn’t been idle. I had a lot of business to see to. Accountants. Stockbrokers. Bills.

I went up to see my aunt in Troon, and arranged for her to take over proper ownership of Robina’s house, with a sum of money to pay the rates and give her a living.

She was horrified at my hair and my blisters and the speed with which I was taking big decisions without a man to advise me, and I got out of it as fast as I could.

In Glasgow, I saw my friends and had my white and red hair made all the same colour as the natural red, and went to sit beside Robina, who didn’t know me, but liked the nurse that brought her the bedpan.

I sat, and inside my head I told her that her daughter Robina had been shot, and her son Colin was in prison on a drugs charge, and that her son Kenneth James was in his grave, killed by this great photographer pal I liked working with so much.

And that her first husband, Old Joseph, was a heap of clean, small, yellowed bones, with not a shred of flesh on them, at the bottom of a hot grey pool in the West Indies.

I thought, inside my head, that, it would have been Gordon Geddes’s final triumph, to see what had become of his wife’s bummer of a first husband with the cheap set of values.

Then I thought that, in fact, he rated a bit higher than that. He would have been sad, for Robina’s sake.

I bought an apartment in Glasgow, for a lot of money. I answered a bunch of calls from people who had rung Troon while I was away. I thought I ought maybe to get a secretary. I rang back the man who wanted to talk about the make-up for the film of the American book, and flew to London to see him, and got the job.

I went to see a lot of old films, and a lot of new ones.

I bought a new Abu fishing case, and re-stocked it.

I went to see Johnson, but this time I left my fishing case behind me.

There were new security men on duty, who bowed me in between the two little round trees, and through the plate-glass door and past the desk to the lift, where they pressed the button for me.

Changed days. I was no different really. Except that my hair was one colour instead of two, under this opera hat I had on, and I’d put on my new check knicker suit for visiting invalids.

No one had written Ta Love on the door of the lift.

I thought about it, and decided that I didn’t want to go to 17
b
after all. I waited until the lift stopped, and then I pressed the button for ground again.

I made to get out on the ground floor, but Lady Emerson was standing there.

We looked at one another. I said cheerily, ‘He’s much better, isn’t he?’ and tried to get past, but she didn’t budge.

She looked much the same, if maybe a little less tweedy, it being the end of August.

She made a speech. She said, ‘I expect this is the last place in the world you really want to be. If he was rotten to you, I don’t think you should go up. If he wasn’t, then it would be a kindness to let him see you and explain. And to me, too. I was the one who originally brought you here.’

I didn’t see how she made that out. I found we were both in the lift. I nearly didn’t bother to dictacount her, but finally I did.

I said, ‘As I remember, I came here in the first place to make up Mrs Sheridan, because Kim-Jim and Ferdy fixed it between them.’

I didn’t want to talk about either of them. But after all, I had eavesdropped on her sniffy telephone call to the Owner. When she’d asked about this girl Ferdy had brought in.

Frances Emerson said, ‘They arranged your job. I arranged for Ferdy to borrow the studio. Jay guessed. That’s why he was so bloody-minded about you all tramping about… We’d better go up.’

I let her press the button. I said, ‘Why? Why did you want us all to work in his apartment? Had it to do with his job?’

‘Yes, it had,’ she said. ‘In a way. He’d been involved with the Madeira business, you see, before his… illness. We thought he ought to take an interest in it again.’

‘We?’ I said.

‘Really… Bernard, my husband,’ she said. ‘It’s his business.’

I gazed at her. Poor bloody Johnson.

‘So you knew all about me,’ I said.

She had very direct eyes. She didn’t dodge anything. She said, ‘Yes. Most things.’

‘About the dyslexia? Before he explained it?’

She still didn’t look away, but this time she flushed a little.

She said, ‘Yes. I knew before he did. Actually, we were taking a risk. We weren’t at all sure that you and your brother weren’t involved in what was going on. We did take precautions, but Jay’s own team didn’t like it. Raymond was furious with us. That’s why he kept hovering round, and why he was given such a bad time when Jay finally came across him.’

Mary-had-a-little-lamb country…

And of course–

I said, ‘The security men? That’s why they searched me?’

She looked half guilty, half tickled. ‘You won that one,’ she said. ‘You should have seen the fuss in Establishment over dry-cleaning their uniforms.’

I said, ‘Wait till they get the bill for dry-cleaning a set of bloody bloomers with ostrich feathers.’ I only half listened to myself, I was thinking so hard.

‘We weren’t very popular with Boy Johnson,’ said Lady Emerson ruefully.

The lift had come to a halt. I said, ‘You don’t seem to have given much thought to his point of view. He was hardly over whatever had happened to him. Which wasn’t a plane crash. Was it?’

She opened the doors and we walked out of the lift and both stopped.

‘Of course it was,’ said Lady Emerson. ‘There is no other explanation that could possibly be put about without doing a lot of harm, and most of it to Jay himself.’

‘How?’ I said. ‘By the people who did it? Are they still about?’

She had her hand on Johnson’s door.

‘He doesn’t think so,’ she said, and pressed the doorbell.

Neatly overalled, Mrs Margate came to the door, and showed us where to put our things. She had a nice smile, and the look of anxiety had left her face, along with the weariness.

There was no dog, of course. Raymond’s famous visit to Pets Inc. had been to do with parrots. And watching me, furiously, in case I harmed his precious Boy Johnson.

I went the wrong way, and found myself in Natalie’s bedroom. Before I came out, I noticed how different it was. So was the hall. All the gilt and flock paper and contract plants had gone, which was a deadly waste, as it was all new that spring.

Instead, everything was a lot quieter and shabbier, and I wondered even if the Owner had had a bit of bad luck, such as having to rebuild two hundred thousand quids’ worth of shattered yacht; until I had another look.

The stuff was really nice, if a bit worn, and a lot of it was antique. It looked as if it had come from another house, maybe with bigger rooms, but it fitted in all right.

The biggest change was in the studio, which had lost all its plants and half its furniture too, and was partly occupied by a wooden platform with an armchair on it, and an ancient easel and painting table, both clearly in use.

There was no sign of Johnson. The canvas on the easel showed the head and shoulders of some man, blocked in lightly. The smells of oil and paint were thick and ripe, like they used to be in art college, and Lady Emerson sneezed.

The sliding glass windows moved, and someone came in from the balcony.

‘Bless you, Frances,’ said the Hon. Maggie; and caught sight of me.

‘Rita! You came!’

‘Nearly not,’ commented Lady Emerson. ‘She was sneaking away as I came in.’

Maggie looked nice but covered-up, in a striped seersucker suit with a wisp of silk at her neck. She had kept up her tan, but changed the straight cut for a crimp-perm.

Fair enough. Win them, lose them. With Ferdy gone, Johnson was the natural successor.

Lady Emerson said, ‘Raymond and Maggie work for Jay, as I expect you’ll have gathered.’

‘No, she hasn’t,’ said Maggie. ‘We were all kept apart from one another on this job as if we had hepatitis. Raymond and I nearly went crazy.’

‘And Lenny?’ I asked.

‘He’s Bernard’s sailing man really. My husband’s,’ Lady Emerson said. ‘But we loan him out to fashionable watering-holes now and then with his judo pyjamas and a book of sauce recipes. He really is a very good cook. And, of course, the best possible man on a boat like… on a boat.’

There were no potted plants on the piano, or tantalised fruits. There were still a lot of books lying about, but with markers in them. The piano was shut.

I said, ‘It was awful, what happened to
Dolly
.’ I was angry.

Lady Emerson looked at me quickly. She said, ‘Among all the other horrible things that went on? Why that especially?’

‘If you weren’t there, you couldn’t understand,’ said Maggie with surprising bluntness. She added, ‘He’s rebuilding her, God bless his dividends. I hope I get a shot when she’s done. He’s decided to stay on the job, Frances? What’s going on in his head now?’

‘If you’re not there, you can’t understand,’ said Lady Emerson with resignation. ‘Look, is Raymond coming? My instructions are to remove you both and leave Rita.’

I was surprised. I thought I was going to get Johnson filtered through all his protectors. I had found the idea quite comforting.

Raymond appeared, inside the room this time instead of out on the fire escape, strode across and kissed my cheek and said, ‘Hullo. You look fine. Are you all right? You’re getting lunch: Connie’s making it. We’ve been chucked out. Small sitting-room. Have you got your rights and lefts on, or will I take you?’

It was like a sort of briefing for hockey: all quite matter-of-fact, including the brush on the cheek.

I said, ‘You’d better show me which door again. Or Mrs Margate.’

‘Connie,’ he corrected, and stopped. ‘Hey, the St Lucia Rotary Club!’

I looked about. I said, ‘What?’

‘Hurricane Disaster Fund. List of subscribers came in yesterday,’ Raymond said. ‘
J. Johnson, Esquire
, as you might expect. And forsooth,
Miss M. Geddes, one thousand pounds
? Rita?’

What Natalie had said had hurt. I didn’t want her money. I said,

‘What do you think? It’s for the rebuilding and upkeep of the Narc…’

I paused.

Raymond was watching me anxiously. ‘Don’t spoil it,’ he urged.

I knew what the word was. It was the one bloody word I had learned in the whole awful disaster.

I opened my mouth, and murdering the whole of my childhood, I threw it away.

‘… the Nemesis Department,’ I said.

Raymond put his hands under my arms and, lifting my feet off the ground, spun like a top, crowing, ‘She qualifies! She qualifies! You get the Johnson sorority pin and join us in daily singing of the company song… Christ, you’re going to be late, and he’ll kill me.’

He set me down. I felt great. I remembered why I was there, and didn’t feel quite so great.

Raymond said, ‘Look, he won’t make you feel bad. If you want to belt out something, then go ahead. He likes it that way.’

It sounded as if the embroidery had worked. I therefore said, ‘How is he?’

‘Making great strides, considering,’ said Johnson’s voice irritably from the doorway. ‘It really is very nice to see you, and a different colour too, but you are supposed to be cheering me up, not the Bowling Club here. The vodka’s getting warm.’

He waited for me. I thought he’d be in pyjamas, but he was wearing a nice easy sweater, and had both hands in the pockets of a pair of comfortable and expensive light trousers.

Behind the bifocals, he still had some suntan on top of hospital white, which produced a tone quite close to Beige, and certainly less than Weird Effect, which is how I’d last seen him. He’d had his hair cut.

As I came up, he said, ‘May I?’ And withdrawing a hand, dropped a kiss on one cheek as Raymond had done.

‘Graduation Day,’ he said. ‘The rest of the time, as you know, we hit you. Come along in.’

He took me into the small study with his hand on my arm, and shutting the door, pointed me in the direction of a seat.

This room, too, had lost all the shiny, new look of the spring apartment. There were a lot of bookcases I didn’t remember, and a long oak table.

I looked at the window to see what sort of curtains he’d chosen, and for the first time noticed the man standing there.

A tall man, with brown hair that curled a bit over his ears, and a fresh complexion glazed by constant sun into a golden tan, and very light, steady eyes.

The twin of Roger van Diemen, the Financial Director of Coombe’s, left for dead with his owl mask among the cocaine on St Lucia.

He stood harmlessly before me. And Johnson, when I looked round, just gazed placidly back.

‘Let me introduce you
formally
,’ said Johnson, ‘to Mr Roger van Diemen. He is alive. He is one of us. And he is standing there very, very frightened because he doesn’t want a bag of peanuts in his vodka…

‘Roger, sit down. The worst is over. Rita, only a week in hospital could have brought me to the point of hysteria where this seemed the sensible thing to do. Take up your vodka and listen.

‘Now, Roger. Explain.’

Among all the other things Johnson was, he could be a bastard. Lady Emerson was quite right, and I’d seen quite a lot of it. As I’ve said, I wouldn’t want to be trained by him.

He hadn’t told me, allowing me to blunder off after Roger van Diemen, that Roger van Diemen was in the same intelligence department as himself. He had known perfectly well that he was high on drugs and unhinged with jealousy and anxiety over Natalie. It was van Diemen’s increasing unreliability that had attracted the attention of his colleagues in the first place.

But nothing could be done about it, because he had been picked by Clive Curtis to be the lynchpin of his new smuggling scheme, using Coombe International. And whatever he did, from bashing me in the Mercedes to trying to smash Kim-Jim and me out of his way on the sledge-run, Johnson wasn’t going to expose him, or warn me about it.