Johnson-Johnson 06 – Dolly and the Nanny Bird (29 page)

He looked the same, except that the smile under the moustache had resignation in it, and perhaps even a shadow of admiration. He could not, of course, speak. He didn’t have to.

We had got on to the Gondoliers, as I remember, by the time the oxy-acetylene cutter finally began to draw a line through the wall. Johnson, it turned out, had a moderately melodious tenor, and I had been one of the Kings of Barataria myself in my schooldays. It was a scramble to get some of the lines in, I distinctly remember, but we managed:

‘
Replying we –
’

‘
Say, as –
’

‘
One indi
–’

‘
Vidual. As I –
’

‘
Find I’m a –
’

‘
King, to my –
’

‘
Kingdom I –
’

‘
Bid you all. I’m a –
’

‘
– Ware you ob –
’

‘
Ject, to pa –
’

‘
Vilions and –
’

“Palaces, but you’ll – ’

‘
Find I re –
’

‘
Spect, Your Re –
’

‘
– Publican fallacies…
’

We didn’t have to go any further. At just that point, a section of the wall fell out. It drew the ball to the sound. And, well trained as I was, I shouted, briskly, to summon it back.

I think Donovan must have thought Hugo, seen clear through the gap, was in process of torturing us. As, I suppose he was. At any rate, he lunged through the opening and fired.

It caught Panadek in the shoulder and he yelled. And the ball turned and made for him.

It would have been poetic justice to let it go, but I had had enough poetry for one night. So had Johnson, it appeared. We shouted ‘
Stop
!’ at the same moment and then, feeling stupid, alternately until someone found the switch and the ball rose slowly into the ceiling and both doors opened.

Hugo still leaned against the wall, his hand gripping his shoulder and blood running down between his long fingers. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You ought to have been the toy designers and I ought to have been the nanny.’ Then he felt in his jacket and drawing out the brown manilla envelope, tossed it towards us. ‘If it contains a page from the
Politika
, I don’t want to know it.’

‘It contains a page from the
Politika
,’ Johnson said.

They had replaced the burst tyre on the Mercedes Benz. Johnson drove down the mountain very carefully. We didn’t say very much because we were both flogged. Indeed Johnson’s hands, when he took them off the wheel, were trembling. And I was wrestling, as it happened, with my conscience.

Then, instead of going round to the harbour where
Dolly
was, Johnson drew up at the Hotel Mimosa in Herceg-Novi.

There was a blue and white police van standing outside, under the orange trees. I said rudely, ‘Oh bloody hell,’ and sat there with my eyes full of tears.

Johnson glanced at me and then away again. He said, ‘There were some things that neither Hugo nor Eisenkopp could have done. Engineering the Warr Beckenstaff for you. The M.M.A. badges that identified the party at the Wonderland. The torn note in your pocket. The introduction of Lazar to Charlotte. The way Panadek found out about the whole of Gramps’s scheme, right from the beginning… But I didn’t know you knew.’

‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Not until I saw that futile apron nappy round Benedict’s legs in the basement. He’s been wearing a kite nappy for weeks now.’

Bunty came out between two policemen as we went through the doors. She too looked just the same, with frizzed hair standing out round her earrings. She had her high-heeled boots on and if she was pale, the make-up hid it. She just looked annoyed. In fact, she pretended not to see me as they went past. I wondered where Gramps had picked her up and how they came to have joined forces.

She was a hard case; out for herself and for money: the fate of the Croats would mean nothing to Bunty. Was it through the nanny network, for example, that she found out that Mike Widdess worked for MI5, which let her sell the information later to Gramps? I didn’t know yet if she worked alone, or with partners. Or if her team or Gramps had faked that car crash in which Mike Widdess died. Perhaps we should be surprised, looking over her record, to find how often she had been employed in a household where the child had been threatened with kidnapping.

One had to suppose that she had played along both Gramps and Panadek in other ways too. Panadek for merely the hell of it. I expect he gave her gifts. He certainly rummaged her rooms and her mail, and when he found out what she was up to, he had merely to plant his microphones and stand by for the prize money. Or rather, the Folio.

Panadek, whom she thought of simply as a sucker to go to bed with, had been too clever for Bunty all along.

Johnson was speaking to someone in Serbo-Croat. He turned back to me and said, ‘Their room’s on the first floor.’ I didn’t think he had remembered. Then I saw I was looking again at the reflection of myself in his face. I said, ‘Where did the glasses come from?’

‘I keep a spare set in the car,’ Johnson said. ‘Didn’t you notice?’

I hadn’t. Indeed, if you asked, I could have sworn he did at least half of that journey down those serpentine bends without any glasses at all. Then I forgot about it, because we came to a door and Johnson stopped and said, ‘You go in.’

It was Sukey’s crying that burst on the ears as soon as I turned the handle. Grover wasn’t crying although his face was all swollen with past excesses, and there were green tracks down to his chin, and he had wet himself all through his Daniel Hechter trendy tapestry two-piece. He was trying to feed Sukey with an arm round her lolling head and a cup of water pressed overflowing into her toothless mouth. Wherever Bunty had been, she hadn’t been near them for hours and hours.

Then I went in and Grover looked round. His face, so like Comer Eisenkopp’s, was white and defiant and frightened. Then he recognised me, and said, ‘You was not hurting Sukey.’

‘I know you weren’t,’ I said. ‘Sukey’s going to have a nice dinner now, and so is Grover.’

I was in the middle of saying it when Beverley burst through the doorway beside me. They must have sent for her. Her red dress was stained and her careful blonde hair was a mess. What she had, she was going to have to make the best of. No more money for the Radoslav Clinic. Not as Comer’s wife, anyhow.

Then she ran to the bed and kneeling, flung her arms round both Grover and Sukey, crying so that both the kids began screaming at once. But it was the right kind of yelling; open and hearty and angry, with no panic in it. I backed to the door, and came out, and faced Johnson.

‘I know. Bloody kids,’ he said, and gave me his handkerchief. Then we drove to the
Dolly
.

I flew home the next day, to my father.

I only ever fell in love with one man, and he was married. Then his wife died, and the next time we met he had bifocal glasses, and a yacht and was a walking chemical factory.

Meanwhile I had other girls’ children.

[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

[A 3S Release— v1, html]

[August 31, 2007]