Johnson-Johnson 06 – Dolly and the Nanny Bird (25 page)

Hugo said, ‘Have you been to the police?’ and Donovan, lifting his head, replied, ‘No, sir. That note addressed to Mrs Warr Beckenstaff was left in the saloon, and I brought it straight here. It’ll be the demand note. It’s her grandson. It’s up to her what she wants done.’ He said again, in a sick voice, ‘I’m mortally sorry, ma’am.’

‘So am I,’ said Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff. Above the Bakst dress with its tassels all the cosmetics on her elegant features stood exposed of a sudden, like wallpaper. She said, ‘You will hear from me later about this. Describe the men. Where was the yacht at the time? In what vehicle was the child removed?’

Her fingernails curved over the letter like mandarin nail-shields. She hadn’t glanced at it yet. Rosamund, after the first silent breath, had risen to stand beside her mother, her hand white on the back of the chair. She said, ‘Never mind that. Open the letter. Open it.’

I looked at Simon, since no one else did. He was smiling. And then I saw that Hugo was watching him also.

Donovan had begun, as well as he could, to answer her questions. Ingmar heard him out without comment, and then taking up a silver knife slit the ransom letter from end to end and drew out the contents.

The demand was for four million dollars: the same demand that the Brownbelly Bruin was to have made, with the same kind of threats. Ingmar was to take a suite at a specified hotel near to Dubrovnik. She would receive a telephone call there next day. There would be three days to pay, since she had to smuggle the money into Yugoslavia.

I was listening to Gibbings’s voice and Rosamund’s clashing in exclamations, followed by the quieter tones of Hugo and Johnson. Beverley said nothing and neither did Simon. They talked amongst themselves for about five minutes and then Ingmar held up her hand and they were all quiet.

She said, ‘We do not inform the police. We pay the ransom.’

Hugo Panadek was looking at her. ‘I have money here. I might help you,’ he said.

The look she gave him was malevolent as the glare of a swan whose nest is threatened. ‘Mr Panadek,’ she said. The Warr Beckenstaff Corporation is a family business. Unless you are of the family, or married to the family, there is no portion of it in which you may claim to have a share.’

Hugo said, ‘What do I do to become one of the family? Marry you, or your daughter?’

It wasn’t Rosamund who moved, but Dr Gibbings who jumped up, knocking over his chair. For a moment, it looked as if he was going to present a fist to Hugo’s enquiring, soft-eyed face. Then he said heavily, ‘You’ve had your chance. Keep out of it,’ and leaving the table, stood with his hands in his pockets.

Beverley said, ‘I feel sick.’ The circle began slowly to break up. A voice at my elbow said, ‘So what’s with the dying baby? You wanted an excuse to get through and see for yourself, Joanna honey? That it?’

Someone had produced
pivo
and his minions were shouting and spraying the workshop with beer but Gramps Eisenkopp was on the ball still. I might have expected it. I said, ‘He is sick. I wanted you to see him.’

Someone brought Gramps a cigar and he lit it and blew the smoke, lazily in my face. He said, ‘We can’t do nuthin’ for him. A doctor he will not have. If the old lady pays up quick, he’ll be out in three days and good luck to him. If three days is too much, then it’s curtains. Soon, we’ll be running the country. No one on God’s earth is going to charge me with anythin’ and make it stick. And up till then, baby – no one can find me.’

‘He will die,’ I said. ‘Without help today, he’ll die. Don’t you care?’

‘Sure I care,’ said Comer’s father. ‘I care about people. I care about nations, not one spoiled little bastard who doesn’t know if he’s a hog or a horse yet. Whadda you care about? Nursing kids till you’re ninety because your pa’s slung in the slammer?’

‘I don’t mind nursing kids,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I’ve been vaccinated.’

There was a little silence.

‘Come again?’ said Gramps Eisenkopp.

I didn’t answer. I walked over to where I’d left Benedict, and I lifted his carrycot on the workbench. I took off the cover, and the polythene sheet I had spread under the cover.

I unrolled the blankets, and then the towels. As the cold air struck his body, Benedict squirmed and whimpered in his sleep. Feebly, because he was not really awake, and he was very tired.

Benedict is hypersensitive to excessive heat. The long hours of crying had left his face white, but for the black bruises that stood out on his cheek and his arms and his thigh. All the rest of his skin was pinpointed with an angry red thrush.

Grandpa Eisenkopp stared down at him. He said, ‘Kids have measles.’

I made my voice sardonic. ‘1 expect you know best.’

Vladimir looked up from his beer. ‘That kid’s got measles? I ain’t had it yet.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It isn’t measles.’

Eisenkopp stared at me. ‘Now look,’ he said. These kids get vaccinated. Grover and Sukey got vaccinated. How come this kid falls sick?’

I had lain Ben on his side. No one there was going to turn him over. I said, ‘Grover and Sukey got vaccinated by accident against your son’s wishes. You know that’s why Comer isn’t here? He wasn’t vaccinated. He had to go home. The Booker-Readmans had the same theories. I’m immune, but Benedict isn’t.’ I raised my voice. ‘Are all you men vaccinated? If not, you’d better watch out. You’ve been in the same room as a smallpox case for an hour now.’

The tinny voices from the screens over our heads were the only sound then in the silence. Then Eisenkopp said, ‘Prove it. You sound very cheerful to me, for a broad who claims to like caring for kids. If this one gets no help he dies, right?’

‘It’s the same principle as yours,’ I said. ‘You made us all suffer, whether we liked it or not, for what you believe in. This is one weapon you can’t fight. Maybe Benedict will have to foot the bill. But he’ll have a good revenge.’

The voice of Rudi said ‘
Smallpox?’

I stared at him. ‘Come and see. I’m not joking. Come over and look. What do you think it is, in the middle of a smallpox epidemic? Maybe you’ll get your money and maybe you’ll get your arms. But they won’t be much good to you, will they?’

They left me alone with Benedict while they talked together. I covered him up before the rash could fade: also because I didn’t want my poor valiant Ben to catch cold.

There was no doubt what the outcome was going to be. The voices of the American branch of the Croatian Liberation Army arguing among itself grew progressively louder and more forceful until finally the group split apart. Two of them began gathering empty boxes and stacking stuff into them. I wondered how Gramps had persuaded the seven of them to keep out of my bed and my kitchen while he masterminded the tape and decoding. Probably by promising them all of everything they could want while they awaited the arms and the money.

It was one of the reasons why I was doing what I was doing. That, and to get either myself or the kidnappers out of the castle while the smallpox barriers were up and Johnson’s men watching the roads. And for the sake of Johnson’s health. To save Benedict, I had presented Johnson’s identity on a platter to his enemies. The least I could do now was try and remove his enemies from their stronghold. The only snag being that Elijah Eisenkopp possessed the Malted Milk Folio.

As I watched, he took up the photocopy and the decoded print-out from his desk and slid them folded into a manilla envelope which he zipped with care into a poacher’s pocket on the inner side of his waterproof jacket. Then taking out a cigarette lighter, he lifted the one remaining photo print I had used and set fire to it. I said, ‘What are you going to do?’

The burning paper lit the bristling eyebrows and the heavy folds between nose and mouth, and the harsh, unshaven set of the jaw. ‘By Christ, I know what I oughtta do,’ said Elijah Eisenkopp. ‘And that’s sling this paper right into that pile of junk over there and let you burn. That’s what they did way back, ain’t it? Burned the rats out, and there warn’t no more plague. I oughtta burn you, baby, for what you done just now; except that we don’t want no alarm till we’re well on our way.’

I said, ‘Where are you going? The roads are still barred.’

‘O.K., they’re barred. But we’ve still got the ambulance,’ Gramps said. ‘And we’ve friends, don’t think we haven’t. The old woman there ain’t going to tell the fuzz, and your pa’s going to play right along: he’s said so already. All we have to do is hole up until we hear the weapons have landed and the old lady comes across with the ransom. And then, of course, we’re going to auction this little baby.’ He patted the pocket where the Folio was.

1 said, ‘And what about me?’

‘You’re goin’ to have your work cut out, ain’t you?’ said Gramps Eisenkopp. ‘You got a sick kid to look after.’

I said, ‘You’re leaving me here?’

‘Whadda you think?’ said Gramps. ‘I ain’t got anything against you – much. If everythin’ goes according to plan an‘ we get what we want, then someone phones your pal Hugo and they can start in an’ break the doors down.’

I said, ‘But what if something goes wrong? They could send all you’ve asked for and something might go wrong at your end. What happens if you get ill, or can’t make the pick-up? You’re not leaving me here alone with that baby?’

‘You got air,’ said Grandpa Eisenkopp. ‘You got warmth. You got caviar and bubbly right in there, dammit. If I was you, baby, I’d just go and get stoned. There ain’t no other way you’re going to enjoy this party.’

Then Vladimir said, ‘The longer she is in this room…’

And Gramps said, ‘O.K. That’s it, Joanna. Get the hell through that door, and take the kid with you.’ And when I didn’t move immediately, he took out a revolver. ‘You hear me?’

I went; and the automatic door slid shut behind me. The door which, like the rest, would only open when approached by Hugo’s master device in Grandpa Eisenkopp’s pocket.

I had got what I wanted. I was alone with Benedict, entombed under the fortress of Kalk, with my life hanging on nothing more substantial than the whim of Elijah Eisenkopp.

Some situations have their own in-built bonus incentives. I lost no time either screaming or starting to draw calendars on the walls. I put Benedict’s carrycot down in the nearest draught-free area likely to have the approval of a Maggie Bee graduate, and then hared round the whole string of warehouses and passages like a demented being, switching on lights.

Then, once I had a picture of the whole area in my head, I returned to Benedict and sat on the floor and considered.

The issuing point, Gramps had said, was under the moat. It connected, pretty certainly, with the office and workshop I had just left. From there, the string of passages and storage caverns ran in more or less a straight line to Hugo’s private apartment, where I had wakened.

But the exit under the moat wasn’t surely the only one. This was Hugo’s creation: the place where he kept his secret prototypes, and his mistresses, and for all I knew ran the most lucrative part of his designing business, coining money unknown to the Communist country of his fathers.

I couldn’t imagine Hugo sneaking out into the dripping bushes every time he wanted a romp on the waterbed with his girl friend. There had to be an exit up into the castle. And it had to be in a passage, or through one of the outer walls of the warehouses.

I had a look to check that Benedict was still peacefully sleeping and then I began methodically to search.

The texture of the walls was the first thing that struck me in the good light. Within the warehouses, fitted racks covered most of the brickwork. The rest of the wall space was exceptionally well finished. Some of it had been tiled; some of it painted in bright cubist designs, oddly dated. Both had the virtue of concealing any cracks where an exit might conceivably exist.

The rest had been washed in uniform biscuit colour, marred here and there by chalky patches, as if the glaze had failed to key into the base. I noted it, because it was out of character with the rest of Hugo’s craftsmanship. Also because it reminded me of something, I couldn’t think what. After I discovered the second stretch, in a corridor, I remembered. It was like nothing so much as a page from a child’s magic scribbling book. The kind where the sheets appear blank until rubbed over with a soft pencil.

It was a silly idea. Anyway, I didn’t have a soft pencil. On the other hand, there on a shelf under the light was a pack of charcoal sticks, thick and substantial and black.

Feeling a fool, I opened the pack and pulled out a stick. Holding it like a windscreen wiper instead of a pencil, I smeared it up and down Hugo’s immaculate wall. Then I stood back.

Where the charcoal had been, the wall was smudged in two shades: one dark grey, one almost white. And bang in the centre, as clear as an optical chart, stood an elegant capital E.

I wasted time just staring at it, while a haze of charcoal settled all over me. Then leaping forward, I attacked the passage in earnest.

Five seconds later, with hands, face and wall equally loaded, I had it. The treated patch was small, and just below eye level; and consisted of a long pointed arrow with the single word KEY.

The arrow pointed up to the ceiling. The ceiling, I noticed for the first time, was made of the same sort of finish. I found a crate and stood on it and scrawled over my head, in a downfall of fine powdered charcoal. Nothing there. I had to shift the crate twice before I found it. The next arrow said KEY again, and pointed down, this time, out of a doorway.

Hugo’s particular brand of wit. I didn’t blame him, I was too excited. I ran through the door and looked wildly about me.

The next set of arrows set off round one of the warehouses and ended back in a corridor with a blank wall which my charcoal could do nothing with. I spent five fruitless minutes on that, before the texture suggested an alternative.

Magic scribbling books were not the only thing of their kind. There were also magic painting books. Instead of pencil, you had to brush the page over with water.

No brush; no water. But, wait – a sponge, in my bathroom. I ran there and back through the passages, and scrawled on the walls as I went for good measure. If there were any more magic drawings, I didn’t catch them. But I arrived back at base and attacked the blank wall with my bath sponge.

This time the words came up in red, with Enid Blyton fairies drawn all about them. KEY, and an arrow, pointing back the way I had come.

I said into the air, slowly and viciously, ‘Hugo, dear. This isn’t a party game for one of your futile mistresses. This is for someone locked in your bloody labyrinth and trying to find her way out.
Will you stop playing games
?’

Which was silly of course. For the amusement Hugo had devised had been laid out long before any of us had ever met him; and he couldn’t hear me, although I could hear him. I could hear all their voices coming from the remote set of screens in my bedroom, yapping into the untenanted air. I set my teeth and began to walk backwards, washing the walls as I went.

The arrows went all round the warehouse and out into the next couple of corridors and over another ceiling. Then they stopped, and neither the sponge nor the charcoal would answer. I went back to the last arrow and stared at it. There was something different about it. Inset in the tail was a number. No. 1, it said.

I went back and checked. None of the others had numbers. Even the rooms weren’t numbered. The only places in the underground network where I had seen numbers were on the racks.

I looked at the nearest rack. It said No. 36.

The racks were in no sort of order. I had to go right back to the first room, where Benedict was slumbering still, to find No. 2.

Join the dots. Connect the numbers in the right numerical order, and you get another picture. At least, that’s what happens in kids’ books.

I might be mad, but it was worth trying. Having found rack No. 1, I climbed up and looked at the number, and particularly at the ball-headed pin by which the number was attached to the casing. I pressed it, and nothing happened. I pulled it and it rose under my fingers: no more than an eighth of an inch, with a click I should never have heard unless I was listening for it.

Hugo, you ass. Missy’s Golden American Wonderland in the flesh. But it was going to get me out. If I could only keep upsides with Hugo Panadek’s infantile imagination, it was going to set us free, Benedict and myself.

I didn’t bother dragging the crate to No. 2. I jumped for the number, my fingers tearing the pin, and pulled it out at the second attempt. Then to the third, which was on the other side of the room. For as I said, the numbers weren’t in order. That, after all, would have been too easy.

There must have been about eighty racks altogether but I didn’t have to do them all, which is just as well, as my fingertips were fringed to the middle joint. Rack No. 36 was the last with a ball-headed pin. All the rest were firmly screwed into place and neither pushed, pulled, nor put their tongues out at me. I looked around, at a loss. Then I looked again.

I had joined all the dots and as in all the best games, I had been allotted my prize.

Where there had been a smooth tiled wall, there was now a large irregular hole in the corridor. And within the hole, ridiculously, a red light appeared to be flashing.

I went forward slowly. The light came from a neon sign wired into the opposite wall of a small doorless chamber about the size of a cage at the zoo. The ceiling, like the walls, was smoothly tiled, and the floor was of solid concrete. Standing in one corner was a large canvas sack, closed with string at the mouth. The sign read, quite simply.
Welcome
.

I stepped cautiously into the hole. Nothing happened. I examined the walls and the ceiling. There was no aperture that I could see, apart from the hole I had entered by, which seemed to be pitted like Gruyère cheese along its jagged edges. I touched the canvas bag gingerly, and when nothing darted out and grabbed me by the wrist, I began to open it.

It was full of large flat metal shapes, whose erratic profiles were fitted with cribbage pegs. They were coloured a uniform biscuit colour, and looked like nothing so much as the segments of some enormous jigsaw puzzle.

They were the segments of an enormous jigsaw puzzle. And the pegs on the rims of the pieces were precisely the right size to fit into the sockets in the thickness of the entrance hole.

I was being invited to fill in the hole. But whether to brick myself up on the outside or the inside was the question.

It was the sign, flashing on and off, that decided me. If I was being made welcome, presumably it was as a guest, not an outsider. And I was not afraid of what Hugo might devise. If I hesitated at all, it was because this time I could see no visible outlet from the chamber; no heating, no air inlet. I might, given someone far more malevolently-minded than Hugo, be stepping into that airtight box Benedict’s kidnappers had threatened. But Hugo was not of that kind.

All the same, this time I went and fetched Benedict, and lifting him through the hole, placed his cot on the floor just inside it. Without me, he couldn’t survive alone anywhere. Whatever was going to happen, it might as well happen to both of us.

Then I tipped the contents of the bag on the floor and kneeling, began to sort out the jigsaw.

There wasn’t a picture on the pieces or anywhere, so it wasn’t especially quick. More a case of painstaking effort, backed by years and years of practice with children. I found the bits that fitted into the side of the hole first, and then searched for and began finding their neighbours all round the edges. The hole began to grow smaller, like the stopped-down aperture of a camera. The light from outside grew less as well, and the flow of fresh air. Inside, all we had was the glare, on and off, of the sign; which flushed Benedict scarlet, and also my hands and arms, where they weren’t already sooty with charcoal.

The last piece had no pegs on the outside, but like the keystone of an arch, remained locked in the middle by tension.

So was I. We were immured. It remained to be seen for what purpose.

Benedict slept. I stepped back, kicking the empty bag to one side and waited, my eyes searching the walls and the ceiling. The red light, the only light in the chamber, went out abruptly.

Benedict snuffled. I said, ‘It’s all right, my Ben. Joanna switched off the light.’ I couldn’t see, in the dark, whether his eyes had opened. He gave another snuffle and then a whimper and I felt for his cot and kneeling, touched him and talked. After a bit, when he was used to it, I picked him up in his blanket and held him. I don’t know what I was saying. I was thinking, ‘I give this one minute more, and then I unlock the jigsaw.’

I gave it one minute more, and I stretched out my hand and feeling my way, prised at the centre piece of the jigsaw.

It wouldn’t come out.

I tried the others, with difficulty, because Ben wanted his hands freed and once he got them freed, kept swiping me with either his head or his fists. The dark didn’t seem to frighten him.

It frightened me, now. Somehow, the inserting of the last piece had locked the whole wall into position. So we couldn’t get out that way.
Welcome
, the sign had said. A sick joke. Welcome to a hole in the wall.

But the sign had gone off. Accidentally, or on purpose? Chatting to Benedict I turned and with extreme caution, lifted my hand to where the neon lighting had been.

It was still there, cooling now. I ran my fingers all over it, outlining the cursive lettering. A loose wire somewhere: that was all it needed to deposit us both, fried, on the floor of the cage.

Cage. The word set off another train of thought. Why had I thought of it as a cage in the Zoo? There were other cages. Such as a lift.

A lift wouldn’t need to have another door. A lift only needed a button. And the button could only be there, behind the sign, where blinded by light, I wouldn’t have seen it.

It was. A small round shape, which depressed when I pressed it. There was a whining sound, and the pit of my stomach, already sunk to my knees, bored its way down to my ankles. I held the wall with one hand and Benedict with the other and waited.

The whining stopped. There was a jolt; a rattle; an unholy crash, and then a blinding rush of light, air, colour, movement and sound.

The jigsaw puzzle, collapsing headlong outwards, revealed an immense panelled hall full of animal heads, not unlike a set for the Prisoner of Zenda. And standing in the centre of the hall, staring at me, seven well known faces; three female and four blessedly male.

‘Well, well,’ said Johnson. ‘All this and the Nigger Minstrels as well.’

Without Hugo, I don’t think any of them except Johnson would have believed anything I said, either about the underground rooms or about Grandpa Eisenkopp. At the sight of the baby, Rosamund’s handsome face went extremely red and she ran to me. When I put him into her arms she closed her hands round him like claws, crushing all the cream pin-tucked chiffon and making him give out a short scream of surprise and resentment. As I have said before, you have to put up with the fact that babies are never endearing on cue: quite the opposite.

Ingmar said, ‘Is he all right?’ in a high voice and walking over, unwrapped him with one taloned hand. You couldn’t actually see the bruises on him for charcoal, but from the way he was roaring, there was no doubt he was in fair working order.

Then Beverley said ‘Simon! ’ and fainted. As Simon made no move towards anybody, Dr Gibbings fielded her. He carried her over to a sofa and then coming back, went to look at the baby.

I said, ‘I don’t want to bore you, but while we’re all standing here, that crowd are getting away. Hugo, they’re in your workshop. I don’t suppose you can block up the door from the moat?’

I have never seen Hugo Panadek look so animated. His tanned head glittered, his eyes glowed, his moustache travelled sideways in the most beatific of smiles. ‘Joanna! ’ he said. “You know you are the first… the very first of all my stupid mistresses to find a way out of that bedroom? ’

‘Yes. Well, I’m not your stupid mistress yet,’ I said tartly. I knew I looked like a freak. ‘Can you…?’