Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (25 page)

By the fourteenth hole, my father was out of the game. It took the concerted efforts of the Begum, Johnson, and myself to persuade him to go back to the clubhouse. He maintained that if Mr. Tiko could strap up his clubs and travel around as a spectator, it was no less his duty to supervise his own match. The Begum pointed out that as a competitor it wasn’t his duty to supervise anything, and that Johnson, Trotter, and I could more than adequately see that the rules were observed.

In the end, James Ulric disappeared wheezily into the dusk with the Begum, and I felt a pang as I watched the brave blue and white shade travel behind the palmetto on its angular struts. He was too old for golf anyway, and he had to learn it someday. And he had the Begum, for God’s sake. My father wasn’t marrying a Japanese golfer.

I turned to get back into the cart just as someone beyond the green called, “Hullo there!”

Sergeant Trotter had already entered his cart. The other five of us stood where we were. Then Johnson walked down from the green to the pathway beyond and said, “Hullo?”

From where I stood, I could see the top of a car. Great Harbour Drive, the broad white road marked out along the eastern shore of the island lay, I remembered, between this hole and the beachside green of the next. Reminded of the sea, I listened, and there it was, beyond the enclosing jagged horizon of palmetto scrub and dark bushes, the hissing boom of the translucent green waves, there ahead out of sight. I realized that it had become very quiet. The low buzz of the generators, the whine of machinery, the voices of work gangs had all stopped with the dip of the sun, and there was only the stir of the light wind through the dense, man-high jungle on either side of the fairway and a little whine as it made its way through the beams of the black service hut by the green. Johnson said, without moving further, “Edgecombe? You shouldn’t be here. Is Spry there with you?”

His voice, carrying on the trade wind, floated clearly over the fairway. Sergeant Trotter, waiting in the first cart ahead of me, got out and began to walk over the green. Mr. Tiko, after hesitating a moment, returned to his cart and sat down patiently, his small hands on his neat blue knees. Brady and Krishtof stood where they were, Brady with the pin still in his hand. Edgecombe’s voice said, “No. I let him off the hook for a bit. Who’s winning?”

“It’s a Japanese triumph,” Johnson said. “Mr. Tiko is champion, and Krishtof and Brady are playing it out for second and third. We’ll come and have a victory drink at your house.” He paused and said, “Look, pack it in, Bart. There isn’t much point in the protective custody bit if you’re going to rove about like an unraveled jersey. We shan’t be long.”

It was convincingly said, but I stood there, cold in the warm evening, and knew it wasn’t said for Bart Edgecombe’s ears. What was it Brady had already remarked?
I bet even money that we’ll see Edgecombe out on this course
. And here he was, on his cue; just as the Begum and my father had been hustled out of the way; just as Johnson had tried to get rid of me as well. For this was their last chance, his and Edgecombe’s, to capture their assassin. And this, with Edgecombe in full view of his enemies, was how Johnson had chosen to do it.

I had got to that phase in my thinking just as Johnson said,

“… shan’t be long.” I think all of us heard the light rustle of leaves to one side of the path, well beyond Johnson. I know Krishtof looked around. Brady was staring still, frowning, at Johnson. Then a man, a dim silhouette in the bushes, rose to his feet, drew back his right arm, and threw something.

I heard Johnson yell, “
Run
!” and saw the gun appear in his hand as he flung himself on the ground. I did the same. Wallace Brady dropped like a stone, pulling the dancer down with him. Mr. Tiko, beyond in his cart, half rose to his feet. As he did, the world, and Bart Edgecombe’s car with it, exploded into a curdling glare of black smoke and fire.

The blast whipped the palmetto toward us, and the four canopies billowed and jerked, fringes twisted. A red star burned from the bushes where Johnson was lying, and then another; the crack of the gun was lost in the rumble and crash of Edgecombe’s car dissolving and twisting in flames. From the other side of the fairway, fire answered back. Trotter, running bent and incredibly fast, came halfway across the green and flung himself in the lee of Mr. Tiko’s blue cart. Mr. Tiko, his pallid face half-lit by the fire, hesitated a moment and then slid down beside him. Wallace Brady had left the green also, a dark shadow rolling toward me. A moment later he blundered on top of me, his hand, hard on my arms, and dragged me behind his own cart. He said, “
Give me your gun
.”

He was breathing hard. I couldn’t see Johnson, and Krishtof had vanished. My handbag with the gun in it lay under me. I said crisply, “It’s in the cart,” and thrust my hand into my bag as I felt him raise himself to look. He glanced down just as I got the Frommer by the barrel and I saw the surprise and anger on his face as he blocked the sky out above me, his hand ready to snatch. From the dark line of palmetto brush opposite came the snap and sparkle of gunfire, and not far from me a gun thudded in reply — Johnson’s — and then another. A cultivated voice just behind me said swiftly, “Do you know, I don’t think we want you to have a gun, Mr. Brady.”

I turned. A very efficient fist connected with Wallace Brady’s jaw, and the dark bulk above me suddenly rolled off and vanished. “One down and one more to go,” said Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe, smiling. He put my Frommer into my rather limp hand. “It’s all right: I wasn’t in the car when it exploded. All part of the system to draw their attack.”

I heard Johnson call, “Bart!” and Edgecombe smiled reassuringly at me again. One hand was heavily bandaged and he had a very businesslike-looking gun in the other. He said, “Don’t worry. We’ve got them surrounded. Get into the bushes and if one of Pentecost’s friends comes across you, shoot to kill. They’re paid assassins, this crowd.”

Then he had gone. I looked at Brady. The brief dusk was already sinking to darkness. My all-American golfer lay on his back, his cream chalk-striped tunic all crumpled and stained. At the foot of the green, Trotter’s cart was still stationary with Mr. Tiko lying beside it, his heels together and his arms over his head. Then I saw Trotter had left it again and was traveling, in that extraordinary professional way, head down away from me and toward the third empty cart.

A moment later and he was in it, crouched down on the floor. For a bit, nothing happened. Then it shook and began to move forward slowly, under a rattle of gunfire. In the black jungle beyond it a man suddenly screamed and someone else gave a yell of triumph. The burning car sent a tongue of flame into the air and in its light I saw Krishtof Bey’s pink Bulgar shirt as he leapt to his feet from the bushes, brandishing somebody’s rifle, primitive triumph on the brown, hollow face. Then, like a shimmer of oil, he was out of the rough and into the fourth and last cart, bouncing over the grass after Trotter. Unlike Trotter, Krishtof Bey didn’t trouble to lie down on the floor of the cart. Rifle on shoulder, he knelt on the white seat and fired back whenever a dark figure moved on the skyline, warbling a quarter-tone war cry at intervals. From somewhere, I could hear Spry’s voice telling him to mind how he went.

There was a lot of noise suddenly. Behind the brush on the other side of the fairway came the coughing roar of a series of engines starting up, and then the sound of creaking demolition as a line of heavy vehicles began to move forward, crushing the cane and wireweed and burgrass, the pockwood and Hercules’-club, the elders, the plantains, the tangle of trefoil and honeysuckle to move up at the back of the gunmen. Behind me, and ahead on the road beside the wreck of the car, I could hear other engines starting and stopping, and a number of voices, among which I thought I could make out both Edgecombe’s and Johnson’s. The trap around their enemies was being snapped shut at last.

Beside me, Brady groaned and stirred. I rolled into the bushes just as the gunfire at the end of the green suddenly intensified. I thought: They know it’s a trap. And they know Edgecombe isn’t dead — it’s their last effort to kill him.

Krishtof Bey’s cart had reached the dark bulk of the hut. I saw him jump out, his rifle gleaming, and blend into the gloom of its walls. Trotter’s cart had stopped also, and I saw Trotter was running again, but in the opposite direction, where Edgecombe and Johnson were firing on my side of the green. I thought: He’s wiser than Krishtof. In a moment those tractors are going to flush out the gunmen and then they are going to come out in the open here, firing.

Trotter had nearly got to the rough when he stopped. I heard Edgecombe’s voice call sharply, “Come on, man!” and guessed Trotter was blocking their fire. Then I saw that Trotter had raised his right hand, and that the gun in it was pointing at Edgecombe.

Trotter aimed, steadied, and fired.

Edgecombe cried, “Oh, my God.”

For a moment — for a tenth of a second — it seemed as if everything had stopped: the machinery, the shouting, the firing. Then someone moved clumsily in the bushes where Edgecombe had spoken. Moved, rose, took half a step forward, and then fell to his knees and then on his face at the edge of the grass. I could distinguish the crumpled bush tunic and, as he dropped, the flash of reflected fire in the twin lenses of his bifocals. Then Edgecombe’s big frame in turn forced its way out from the coppice, and his tightened voice said: “You’ve killed him. You bloody traitor, you’ve killed Johnson instead.”

I think I got to my feet. I know that Edgecombe lunged forward, firing, and that in his face I saw the look of a man bent on retribution and death. Trotter fired one shot wildly, ducking, and then turned tail and ran. I saw Edgecombe break cover and follow, across the green to the hut and the car, regardless of his safety in the blazing, flickering light, firing again and again. I saw Trotter stagger and steady himself, and turning, take aim at Edgecombe again; I saw Edgecombe duck and fire and then curse as the revolver clicked, empty.

Behind me Wallace Brady got to his feet, slowly at first. Then with a lurch he began to move, running, toward Edgecombe’s exposed back. Unaware of his danger, Edgecombe slowed, intent on reloading. In a moment, Brady would reach him. The Frommer, heavy and hot, was still in my hand. I thumbed off the safety catch, raised it, and took steady aim at my all-American golfing companion.

A hand came down hard on my wrist and another, in the same movement closed my opening mouth. “Not this time, Doctor,” said Johnson. “Wallace Brady is mine and the Begum’s.”

I looked at him, the Frommer dropped from my hand. He released me and regarded me, grinning, and then spread his hand under my arm rather quickly. “Hold on,” he said. “I told you about my chilled and rolled underwear. We’re bear-leading the baddies, remember? We do six permutations of this, and then someone really gets killed.”

My head had cleared, and I didn’t need anyone’s help to stand up. I moved away from his hand. “It looks to me,” I said coldly, “as if you’re letting them both escape.”

Johnson followed my gaze. Outlined against the glowing car, Trotter appeared for a moment, glanced briefly to left and to right, and then stooping, raced left toward the dunes and the sea. Rifle fire from the lee of the hut followed him, and then the dark figure of Edgecombe ran past, gun in hand once again. Brady, veering at the last moment, had plunged into the scrub on the left and was running diagonally on a course converging with Trotter’s.

“They have a car along there,” Johnson said. “Driven into a beach path off Great Harbour Drive. We’ve blocked the drive, and they’ll have to go through the seaside fairways to reach it.”

He had started running, and I was running beside him. Ahead the fire was illuminating Krishtof Bey’s beautiful shirt and his rifle; Spry was standing beside him and a number of other men unknown to me were moving out of the undergrowth. Firing still sounded, but a good way ahead.

“Two of Pentecost’s friends have been accounted for,” Johnson said. “I think what you heard just now will be the remainder.” He had reached the road and crossed it. I saw Spry look around unsurprised, and Krishtof give a jump. Spry put out a hand and stopped him advancing. No one else made a move to accompany us. I trotted after.

The road to the right was blocked by a dark line of cars, and there were men standing about. The dying light from the wreck flickered on a lime-rubble track sweeping up and into the dark on the right; from ahead came the swish of the sea. There was no sound of footsteps. I realized that Trotter had been directed this way, together with those of his friends who survived; that they were being neatly corralled without further shooting; and that the get-away car would be their ultimate pen. Johnson said, “I’m going to the car. There’s no need for you to be in on the kill.”

I said, “Yes, there is.” We were running along the grass edge of the road. On our left, down the fairway, there was no sound at all. It was hard to imagine that there, parallel with us, two men were running for their lives, believing that ahead of them lay a car and escape. I added, under my breath, “Where’s Sir Bartholomew?”

Johnson said, “Heading them off. He knows where the car is. They’ve got a boat, just past the airport. Look. Here we are.”

Between shrubs on the left, a dim gritty track led toward the rustling boom of the sea. We were almost upon the dark shadow lying within before I realized it was a fast convertible coupé, drawn backward off the road, its hood down. In the deep shadow to the right of it, men were lying. Johnson spoke to them softly, then took his place on the path just beyond them, drawing me down to lie at his side.

It was almost dark now, and the afterglow had quite gone from the pale, open sky over the sea. The beach lay concealed behind a black frieze of pine trees and coconut palms, their feet in the rough, mixed scrub edging the long sixteenth fairway. The raised green lay beside me, its flag invisible against the dark trees, and into the darkness ran the even turf of the fairway, the two pale bunkers to left and to right dim patches before the invisible plateau of the tee.