Johnson-Johnson 06 – Dolly and the Nanny Bird (24 page)

‘Might I guess,’ Johnson said, ‘that Joanna has given you the brush-off?’

Hugo laughed. ‘Brother, you might. Miss Love Bundle I tell you she is not. All the same, I don’t wish her harm, or your yacht either. They will ring if there is news. It might be, for example, a radio failure.’

Johnson sat for a moment smoking when Hugo had gone; then he picked up the phone and spoke to Ingmar. I saw, as he talked, his glasses wandering round the room and prayed for him to spot the camera, but he didn’t. Eventually he put down the phone and went on unpacking. I left the sound, but switched off the picture.

The news about the
Dolly
’s radio failure went round all the bedrooms without causing much alarm or even interest that I could see. As they began to change, I turned all the screens to sound only and went on decoding. Someone made a jeering remark about the
Dolly
and its owner: I gathered that Johnson was among the guests on the
Glycera
who had spent most of the trip in their cabins. Beverley had been another. No one at all mentioned the baby.

I finished decoding the last line of the Malted Milk Folio and typed it slowly on the counter in front of me. Then I picked up the microphone and spoke. ‘Please may I have the baby?’

I was prepared for a long wait, but the answer came promptly.
Collect him
.

There was no need to indicate where. The increased volume of crying told me he was near. I jumped up and moved backwards and saw him.

The locked door in the same room had opened. Beyond, running to form, was a Poggenpohl kitchen. And on the floor of the kitchen, wearing a Harrington square between his legs and a clean nappy neatly folded skirtwise around him, was Benedict. My baby bag was standing beside him.

Screaming, white-faced, blinded with rage and with hunger he rowed with both rubbery arms and bawled at the ceiling. Picking him up was a comfort only to me. He sucked and tore at my cheek, pausing only to storm at its shortcomings, and I had to carry him back and forth as I got out the milk: to lay him down again would have been sadism.

He was full of wind with crying, and burped and choked against my shoulder as I moved about. The bruise on his cheek was dark now, and he had three others on his arms and his leg. The water in the tap was boiling. I filled a jug and rested the bottle in it while I got the rest of the stuff from my suitcase.

I broke out a new teat with a small hole. It was going to be dodgy enough, without speed-filling his poor empty stomach. He knew the teat by sight, and also the bottle, and in his fever nearly squirmed out from under my elbow. As soon as the milk was lukewarm I got it out and tucked a feeder under his chin and the teat into his chewing, rabbiting mouth.

He watched me too, his eyes large and sunken and glaring. His brow had wrinkles in it.

So had mine, I suppose. I found I was crying again.

To hell with babies.

He screamed every time I took the bottle out to get up his wind, except at the end. Then he let go the teat, and his round eyes had lost all their starkness, and his soft lips with their sucking-blister began to stretch, slowly and amiably, into a smile.

I smiled back. To hell with babies. I suppose.

I started to think.

From that point, it took just an hour to do all I had to do, including scrounging some cold jellied mackerel and gunpowder green tea for myself. Then I crossed to the console and picked up the microphone and said, ‘The baby’s ill. You’ve got to get a doctor somehow, quick.’

There was no answer. I said ‘Hullo! Hullo!’ a few times with my voice rising, and then repeated it. Above me, the noises from the blank video screens told me that the party had descended from their rooms and congregated in the library. I remembered the glasses and hoped, remembering Comer’s party, no one was served maraschino. I switched the vision on and watched them while I waited for an answer. Hugo was there. After a bit, the door opened and he excused himself and crossed over to speak to the butler. He didn’t come back.

I said again into the microphone, ‘Doesn’t anyone hear me? The baby’s ill. He needs a doctor. You’ve got to get a doctor for him somehow. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?’

There was a click, and the screen lit up. Then, as I bit my lip, watching, the staccato green letters began running over the rectangle. They said,
Bring the child. And the Folio
.

Benedict was asleep again in his carrycot. He had a lot of sleep to catch up on. I picked up the handles and carried him into the kitchen, since that was where I had found him. I held the Folio in my other hand.

Where a wall of cupboards had been, there was now a low door. Without pausing I bent and walked through it.

A voice in Serbo-Croat said, ‘
Udjite
’. A dim light showed me a man I had never seen before in my life, who took the Folio. As I moved through he put out his hand and stroked the arm of my cardigan. Behind me, the door into the kitchen rolled closed with a snap. Whatever lay ahead of me, I was committed. And so was Benedict.

What we were committed to, it soon became apparent, was a network of underground corridors, well lit and after a bit, tiled and painted to look more like an underground hospital than a tribute to the bunker complex of sundry mediaeval Panadeks. Occasionally there was a door. At the first such, my friendly conductor gave my cardigan another stroke, grinned and dropped behind, and a second voice said ‘
Udjite
’, but with a good deal less bonhomie. Upright, with a hangover, he didn’t look much better than prone on the bunk in Donovan’s stateroom. It was Mihovil, the new Folio now in his hand. I walked too slowly for him and when he felt like it, he pushed me along. He took me through the next door as well, which opened not into a corridor but a corner of a vast and shadowy room.

It seemed to be some kind of warehouse. Dimly on either side of me as we crossed it, I could see racks and shelves stacked with objects of various sizes. Then one of the few lights above us, swinging in the draught, shone on something which could only have been a machine gun.

Mihovil saw it at the same moment and snatching it, swung the mouth round to point it straight at me. I could feel the skin straining over my knuckles and I forced myself to relax. Then Mihovil pressed the trigger and the gun spat flame into the air, and a crashing, juddering sound which made nonsense of the impulse to throw oneself flat, because at this range I was dead.

I wasn’t, because it was only sound and only light. No bullets tore through my body, or pierced the side of the carrycot. The only sound, now, was the raucous noise of Mihovil’s laughter.

It was a toy gun. All the things on the shelves — the Scorpion tanks, the field radio packs, the Hawker Harriers and patrol boats and field guns and Spitfires and hand-grenades, were models also. Because Hugo Panadek, of course, was a toy designer.

It wasn’t the place or time to lodge a formal protest with the management. There wasn’t any management – not within sight at any rate. I turned away from Mihovil and went on walking, even when another figure stepped out giggling from another rack and I had to sidestep, quickly, as something came snaking and hissing and throwing off light along the floor straight for my feet.

The firework, whatever it was, disappeared in a burst of spent cordite and the second man took my elbow, still chuckling, and put his spatulate fingers under my chin saying, ‘Hi, baby’; and tried to twist my mouth round to kiss it. A third man ahead called, ‘Hey, Rudi. He’s waiting,’ and he let go and walked along, still holding my elbow. It was Rudi Klapper, the man I had glimpsed only twice, once in the Carl Schurz Park in attendant’s uniform, and once running from the shooting stall in Missy’s Golden American Wonderland. The man ahead, waiting impatiently in a doorway, was Vladimir, the Winnipeg Ukrainian. And with him was Zorzi, the Yugoslav leader of the quartet on the
Dolly
.

They didn’t engage me in conversation: just shoved me along and made what I judged to be fairly obscene remarks to one another in Serbo-Croat, punctuated by drunken belches. They, too, had been in need of reviving. Then a voice spoke sharply ahead in Serbo-Croat and my escorts fell back obediently, to allow me to enter the last door, carrying Benedict.

And this, at last, was the inner sanctum: the combined workshop and office of a top-grade designer who had turned his gifts – some of them – to the planning and execution of mechanical toys.

It was in part an engineering shop, with all this entailed of lathes and casting equipment, vices, benches and banks of hand tools and machine tool accessories. It had all the smells of a workshop: of hot oil and metal dust and wood shavings, of linseed oil and turpentine and drums of paint, of tar and glue.

Only in the far corner, where the filing cabinets and the desk and the typewriters stood, was there a plain strip of carpet and an easy chair, and a little of the luxury with which Hugo Panadek thought it essential to surround himself.

A spiral of cigarette smoke rose from the chair but no one gave himself the trouble of rising from it, or coming forward to greet me.

On the drawingboard beside the easy chair lay the stapled photostat of the Malted Milk Folio, identical to the one I had worked from. And beside it a pile of loose papers: the print-out of the decoded stuff I’d transmitted.

The man I had transmitted them to sat in the easy chair, one hand, with a cigarette in it, laid over the papers. It was all of him there was on display. He didn’t leap to his feet when Zorzi went forward, laid down my Folio print and announced me. Instead, the cigarette made a delaying motion and I don’t really know if I blamed him.

He had a better first feature than Joanna Emerson. In front of him and facing me was a bank of ten video screens, the duplicate of the set in my bedroom.

I waited too, for a bit, and then finding a stool went and sat on it, with the quiet carrycot at my feet. Then having nothing better to do, I watched the screens also.

There were maids in some of the bedrooms, tidying and turning down beds, and someone was clearing glasses from the library: but all the guests were to be seen in the banqueting hall, now brilliantly lit by its Bohemian chandelier and branched candlesticks. As I watched, the diners took their places at leisure at table: three beautiful women and four men of vastly differing ages and cultures.

Four men. Johnson, Simon and Dr Gibbings. And their baldheaded host, Hugo Panadek.

I rose from my stool. I left the carrycot and walked slowly forward. I had almost reached the chair when the door far behind was flung open and a voice shouted across the room in Serbo-Croat.

I didn’t know what it said, but it sounded like welcome tidings. Zorzi, spinning round, laughed aloud and shouted an answer: behind, I could hear the others excitedly talking.

The man in the chair gave a cry of triumph. Bringing his cigarette in to his mouth he leaped to his feet and, flinging an arm round Zorzi’s neck, strode forward to embrace the newsbringer also.

I stood congealed where I was, with my eyes open and an expression which could have been nothing less than bloody piteous.

My captor wasn’t Hugo Panadek. Hugo Panadek was there in the banqueting hall, giving a perfectly innocuous party for six perfectly innocuous guests in a typical spontaneous gesture that must have scared the pants off the Croatian Liberation Army, which had moved with such alacrity into his basement.

The man who had had me brought here; who had learned Widdess’s secrets and planned to blackmail my father; who had used Benedict to force me to decode the Malted Milk Folio; who now, walking excitedly backwards and forwards was throwing words at his colleagues and staff, sometimes in English, sometimes in Serbo-Croat, was my dear old bedridden friend Grandpa Eisenkopp. The Tom Mix of the sonic wheel chair.

But nobody’s fool. I had taken one step towards the desk when he turned, slipping a hand inside his coat and waving me back with the gun that he drew from it. ‘Relax, Joanna honey,’ he said. ‘You don’t think we’ve come this far to have the papers burned under our noses? Now baby, that’s dangerous. You sit down, and no one’ll harm you.’

I sat down. He looked the same, with his black toupée and powerful build and broad, thin-lipped smile. Eisenkopp. I suppose when Yugoslavia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the names might get mixed up. There was nothing wrong with his legs.

He said, ‘We just got good news. Your old man loves ya, Joanna. He’s just cabled the answer. He’ll send the arms.’

I said, ‘He couldn’t! ’ and then as he just grinned at me, I said what was in my mind. ‘What’s in all this for you? You’re an American. Comer’s business must be worth a fortune.’

Gramps Eisenkopp dropped his cigarette, stamped on it, and began to light another. ‘Comer built up the business, sure, and Comer got all the bread outta it. You don’t suppose he’d trust an old country hick with a business empire? Claimed it all went on Buckle Bunnies. Hellfire, I’da been out on my ear if I hadn’t gotten that stroke and he had to give me a bed in the corner.’

‘Did you have a stroke?’ I said, and he grinned. ‘Whadda you think? I had a telephone, and a fire escape. It didn’t hold me back none. The American branch of the Army and me, we held our meetings right in that bedroom half the time an’ Comer never knew.’

I said, ‘Comer wasn’t interested in freedom for Serbo-Croats?’ and he spat, alarmingly.

‘Comer’s an all-fire clean, honest, money-lovin’ American. Comer an’ his whinin’ stitched-up little tart want all the tinsel, and’ll crawl in the dirt to folk like the Warr Beckenstaff bitches to get it. Comer don’t want to know about you or me or Yugoslavia. He hates Yugoslavia. Talk to Comer about where his forebears came from and you’ll be out on your ass like a dog-flea.’

‘Well, that’s the Health Code,’ I said. ‘What beats me is why Comer was allowed to survive. Think what you could have done with the whole Eisenkopp business.’

There were grinning faces all about me. They all knew the story, and were proud of it. Gramps said, ‘I toldya I had telephones, didn’t I? And the best advice, an’ a little natural talent, it must be said. When Comer gets back to New York he has a little surprise or two waitin’ for him. Nice an’ easy over the years, Comer’s assets have gotten into a strange way of meltin’. Now ain’t that peculiar? Of course, if I’da been staying on in the States, I’da been for the slammer. He woulda enjoyed that, would Comer.

‘But I’m not goin’ back. I’m stayin’ here where I belong. And when the old man goes, I’ll be right in there, leading my nation to freedom.’

‘And the castle?’ I said. ‘How did you know about these rooms under the castle?’

Rudi Klapper was perched on a workbench, twirling his own revolver on a single finger, over and over. ‘You was at the Wonderland that day,’ he said. ‘This Big-Head Panadek, he had a toy of the castle, made up from a blueprint. We had a good look, an’ took a picture or two. Just in case.’

They’d been smart, and were proud of it. They’d changed their plans twice: once because of the smallpox and once because the nuns who ran Gospa od škrpjela had turned out to be planning to stay there.

The castle basement had been third choice, and the best. There was an access from the grounds which ran under the moat. They could come and go without the caretakers being any the wiser. The arrival of Panadek himself and his party had been a shock, but after a while they all saw the beauty of it. The only danger was that Panadek himself might take it into his head to open the workshops. And they had guarded against that by destroying all but one of the devices that opened the master doors.

I had seen it. It was in Eisenkopp’s pocket. Where I had no hope of reaching it.

‘That was one danger,’ Gramps was saying easily. ‘The other was sure one hell of a surprise. That dude painter? You knew about that?’

I said, ‘Just that he was a family friend. I think my father must have asked him to keep an eye on me.’

The black eyes surveying me were perfectly genial. ‘You do,’ said Gramps Eisenkopp. ‘An’ that homing beacon you let them fix in your mouth: that was just a precaution as well?’

‘I’m a coding expert,’ I said. ‘And a big security risk. What are you afraid of? You got rid of the bug. If you’ve been watching Johnson since he arrived, it must be pretty obvious that he has no idea where I am, or even
Dolly
for that matter. It’s just as well. I suppose you know what you’d bring down on your neck if you touched him?’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Gramps Eisenkopp absently. He was watching the screens. ‘I guess he’ll just have to have a small accident. Say on the way back to Dubrovnik… Look at that. Ain’t it a gas? I sure wish someone would give me one of these video sets for Christmas. That’s your guy Donovan comin’ in, right? The buddy that Zorzi hyped and left aboard
Dolly
?’

It was Donovan, his once-smooth brow heavily lined, his long thatch blown all over his face; a padded jacket over the gear he had been wearing when last I had seen him, lashed to a bench on the
Dolly
. In one of his hands was an envelope. Enthralled despite myself, I watched with the rest. I saw Donovan enter the banqueting room. Heard him walk up to Mrs Warr Beckenstaff and holding the envelope out, say, ‘I don’t know how to tell you. We did our best, ma’am. But last night four men boarded the
Dolly
, tied the two of us up, and got away with the nurse and your grandson. We woke this afternoon and got free this evening. I’ve just come straight from the yacht.’