Johnson-Johnson 06 – Dolly and the Nanny Bird (8 page)

It wasn’t quite as massive as Panadek in his gorilla suit, but it was a fairly near miss. I could see why takings might be low if they had to pass these things over too often. The cramp in my left arm explained why they didn’t run very much risk.

Silence fell on the Mallards, Sukey and Grover as six pairs of eyes switched hopefully back and forth between my face and the bruin’s. Grover said, ‘The men died. Jonah died them.’

‘They were just pretend men,’ I said, and knelt. ‘Everyone is to hold Joanna’s bear for a little. Grover hold it first.’

It was as big as Grover. He put it on its feet in the dirt, seized a ring on its chest and looking at us expectantly, tugged it.

‘My name,’ said a thick, oily voice next to Grover, ‘is dear old Brownbelly Bruin, your Lover Bear. Stroke your Lover Bear. Kiss your Lover Bear. Take your Lover Bear home to bed with you. And remember. Only Love beats Milk, baby.’

There was an assorted silence. Grover looked smug. Charlie and Bunty both looked queasy, for different reasons. Donovan, Johnson and Hugo all looked at one another, after which Johnson turned to the Greek and broke the silence by saying, ‘I want to buy all your bears. What’ll you take for them?’

For of course, that was how the absent Rudi Klapper had meant to arrange for his ransom for Benedict. By ensuring that the right talking bear and the guy with the M.M.A. badge got together.

I said, ‘Why didn’t the police think of that, then?’

‘They didn’t have Grover with them,’ said Johnson. He was still looking at Alexei the Grecian.

‘No sale,’ said Alexei. ‘I need them bears to run the stall with. They’ve stopped making them.’

‘O.K.’ said Johnson agreeably. He took out his wallet and flipped twenty dollars on to the counter. ‘We won’t take them away. That’s just for letting us pull all their talk-strings.’

‘Are you a weirdo?’ asked Alexei. “What good will them bears do with their strings broke? You cats piss off. You’re violating my privacy.’

In silence Johnson licked off another ten dollar bill. Alexei let it lie. He said, ‘The law says you win them bears by shooting. You win ’em by shooting and you got the law on your side. You try to force me to sell them and I’ll get a patrolman down on your neck and I mean it, man.’

There were twenty-four bears on that stall. I’d been counting them.

‘There is no call to argue,’ said Hugo. ‘We summon the police. It is their business.’

It was, of course. But meanwhile the Mallard kids had set upon Grover, and Sukey was yelling for sustenance. I said, ‘Suppose you all take the kids off for a feed, and Donovan and I will shoot till you’re finished? It’s worth a try. The police’ll keep us for ever.’

‘You’re going to shoot?’ said Alexei. He looked flustered. ‘Two rifles, brother,’ said Donovan. ‘Three,’ said Hugo. ‘You two mommas go feed the family while Daddy goes hunting. There’s a card that says guest of the management.’

Charlotte took it, and she and Bunty pushed off with the children.

‘Three rifles?’ said Alexei cautiously. ‘Four,’ said Johnson stoically. He picked up a bill from the heap and pushed it over the counter. ‘You won’t reconsider?’ Alexei shook his head, and he was probably right. This way he couldn’t lose, anyway.

Although my back and left arm and elbows have never been quite the same since, I have sterling recollections of that competition.

We settled down side by side, Donovan and I, and started to shoot. So did Johnson. After a chain of disasters that threatened to shiver his glasses, Johnson dropped regretfully out while Donovan and I, with the occasional black, began winning bears slowly.

Hugo Panadek watched for two rounds, then took off his long leather tunic, revealing a silk jersey shirt with balloon sleeves over his fine shrink-wrapped gaberdine trousers. He picked up a gun, leaned over, sighted, and killed eighteen rustlers, pausing only to reload in a blur between corpses.

He received a bear, pulled its cord, and left it to talk while he loaded and fired a fresh volley. ‘My name,’ began the bear,

‘is dear old Brownbelly Bruin. Stroke your Lover Bear. Kiss…’

‘Jesus,’ said Donovan. ‘You train under John Wayne?’

Bald head gleaming, Hugo pooped the hood in the butt and dispatched the fifth and the sixth with a flourish. ‘At home,’ he said, ‘we shoot chamois on mountain tops. These are for children.’

Half an hour from that moment he had ten Brownbelly Bruins beside him. I had four and Donovan five, and around us was the biggest crowd in the Park, with the up-tight faces of all the other stallholders behind them. Johnson did a great job pulling the strings in a kind of canon effect. They all said the same thing: it was the best mass advertisement for love and milk since Cleopatra.

It was not, however, serving any other purpose whatever. It began to seem depressingly clear that the four of us had outsmarted ourselves. The Shoot-Out, no doubt, was the rendezvous. But whatever the plan, Brownbelly Bruins could have played no part in it.

My fractured right arm agreed. The spring in my rifle deserved to go into Mrs Eisenkopp’s Wig ’n Lift hairpiece. At the end of the next round, I proposed to retire, lock, stock and barrel.

I was still shooting when Hugo claimed his next bear. I saw Alexei stretch up to lift one, and heard Johnson walk up and stop him. ‘No. Not that one. Not the shelf this time.’

I potted the rustler in the hotel window. Alexei said, ‘What?’

Johnson said, ‘What about the bear on the ground over there? Let’s take that fellow next.’

I potted the stooge through the bar-flaps.

Donovan fired his last shot and craned, with Hugo, over the counter. He said, ‘I didn’t see any bears on the goddam…’

I couldn’t help it. My eye followed theirs down to the floor instead of watching my target.

Alexei, stooping, lifted a bear from the ground. It had a badge on its bosom. I shot, and missed the guy in the water-butt.

Alexei straightened, holding the bear in both arms like a parcel. With a bang and a flash, the little tin guy in the water-butt shot back with a red light, and missed me.

He got Alexei, though. Alexei bellowed.

We all looked at him. There was blood all over his arm, and even more on the bear, which he had dropped on the counter in a blizzard of guaranteed sterilised kapok. Alexei had only been winged. But the Brownbellied Bruin would speak no more; for it had been drilled cleanly through the brown belly.

We taught those rustlers a lesson. The waterbutt killer had gone. But the next little tin hoodlum got three pellets bang in the stomach and went offstage bent like a hairpin, while Hugo managed to hammer the Wells Fargo hatchetman twice. Then he said, ‘For Chrissakes, what are we doing!’ and flung the rifle down and dashed to where Johnson had already plunged through the scattering crowd, towards the distant form of a man whose black, curly hair I had seen retreating like this once before, just after he’d thrust Benedict into a trash bucket.

The smoking tin cutouts were guiltless. It was Rudi Klapper, of the Carl Schurz Park, who had shot Alexei, and shot also the one bear which had been hidden from casual custom. Set aside with an M.M.A. badge in its fur to await another M.M.A. badge to claim it. Because recorded inside, of course, was the kidnap message.

I scooped up the wreck of the bear and took to my heels after Johnson.

I lost him. I couldn’t see Donovan. A red wooden buggy appeared flying a streamer saying ‘Missy’s Wonderland’ and with three familiar heads crammed into it. I took a flying leap and landed in Donovan’s lap just as it rocketed off at top speed through the Park, with Hugo’s bald head lowered over the wheel. I said, ‘It was Rudi Klapper. Where is he?’ One wheel ran up a tree root and down again.

Donovan said, ‘Will you take your bloody bear out of… Thanks. He jumped on the Transcontinental Adventure Train.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘He’s crossed the pond on the train to the parking lot. We have to get round fast, if we’re to catch him,’ said Johnson. ‘
Christ
, watch the…’

He didn’t bother to finish. Behind us, a twenty-foot cluster of balloons rose in the air, over a blaspheming and recumbent balloon man. An ice cream and pretzel stall rocked and there was a small crunch as we went over a set of low railings. There was a smell of fish, and a sound of squealing and splashing. Hugo turned abruptly left, missing two shining grey shapes lumbering out of a swimming pool, grinning.

A rubber ring, descending, pinned our Missy flag to its mast, stinking of dolphin. Donovan uncovered his eyes and covered them again as a chain of antique cars approached, full of children. Hugo spun the wheel and the buggy plunged into a garden of sheep, angora rabbits and llamas, which spat before bolting.

Hugo drove between trees in hysterical lunges. We came out into the open and there ahead was the parking lot, with Johnson’s Mercedes in it. And far beyond it, near the entrance, a low grey Dodge pulling out slowly, with its near front door open and Rudi Klapper racing towards it. We fell out beside the Merc. Johnson said, ‘Joanna, come with me. You two, get up the Sky Ride and watch.’

He had the doors open already. He flung the bear in and switched on the ignition. I dived in behind him. I slammed the door.

Rudi Klapper jumped into the Dodge.

Johnson switched on the ignition again.

Rudi Klapper slammed his door. The Dodge revved up and began to move, fast.

Johnson switched on the ignition again. The dashboard glowed green in his glasses. Without a word, he grabbed and fastened his seatbelt.

The Dodge, accelerating, shot to the gates of the park.

Johnson tried the ignition again and then, his hands on the wheel, turned and looked at me.

I said, ‘I think you need to fasten the bear into its safety-belt.’

With infinite care, my father’s friend Johnson leaned over and ripping out both ends of the belt, clipped them round the sagging fur paunch of the Brownbelly Bruin. Then with equal care he switched on the ignition.

With a roar, the engine fired. The tyres squealed as the car hurtled forward. They squealed again as it stopped with a jolt at the feet of a Saggy Baggy Elephant standing placidly in mid-road, demanding our parking-ticket.

I yelled out of the window while Johnson jerked backwards and sideways to get round the obstacle. The Saggy Baggy sidestepped thoughtfully and leaning its elbow on the window, began to make a long, muffled statement in Brooklynese.

Johnson reversed again, nearly taking its rubber trunk with him, and this time scraped round and down the road to the highway.

There was no sign of the Dodge, and there were fifteen container trucks passing. We got out on the tail of the last one, and weaving from lane to lane raced for five or six miles before being flagged down for good, by the State troopers. Johnson’s explanation, with the burst teddy bear tidily strapped into the pullman beside him, was a miracle of courteous forbearance in the face of raucous incredulity.

We drove under escort back to Missy’s American Wonderland and found a lot of screaming coming down from the Sky Ride. Investigation disclosed that Hugo and Donovan had been up in the cable cars for twenty minutes plotting the Dodge’s itinerary, in aid of which Hugo had cut off the power.

We introduced him to the police as the designer of Missy’s Golden American Wonderland, and the police became suddenly interested. We all repaired to Hugo’s office, having sent word to Bunty and Charlotte and visited both The Great Shoot-Out and Alexei in the First Aid Room. All the bears had disappeared from the ground by the stall where we had left them. The State trooper who had asked the most questions said, ‘And you think this was the bear you were meant to win, if the kidnap had really taken place?’

I said, ‘I suppose so. Or at least, Klapper thought so.’

‘Then,’ said the trooper with impeccable deduction, ‘the message inside must have contained something he thought would give him away?’

‘Who can tell?’ Johnson said. His glasses looked soulful.

‘Well, I can,’ said Hugo Panadek. ‘If you’ll give me a while with a tool or two. He’s smashed the spindle, but the rest is mostly all right, I shouldn’t wonder.’

We made our statements while Hugo worked, and then Bunty and Charlotte arrived, with six kids and three new boyfriends, and Missy’s catering staff sent in a stack of hamburgers.

I was on my fourth when Hugo said, ‘Well. I think that does it,’ and set something in motion.

From inside the last Brownbelly Bear a new voice spoke: a guttural voice, quite unlike that of the Lover Bear we all knew and were sick of.

The voice said, ‘
Mr and Mrs Booker-Readman, I have your son. He is nailed in a box, without food and drink and with enough air to last him until midnight tomorrow
.

‘At eight o’clock tomorrow night, you will come to the tree nearest this stall, and leave beside it a paper carrier bag containing four million dollars in old bills. If you tell the police, no one will collect the money and your son’s box will never be found. He’ll starve and suffocate, Mr and Mrs Booker-Readman, if I am arrested, or if I even suspect you have set a trap for me.

‘
So bring the money. Do as you’re told. And you’ll have your son back. He’s very upset, Mrs Booker-Readman, and very cold and very hungry. And he’s going to stay that way, till he’s paid for. Remember – no police
.’

Someone, I don’t know who, put an arm briefly round my crumb-strewn sweater. The patrolman said, ‘Well, that’s freaky. Why should he stick his ass out to smash up that message? It don’t tell us nothing!’

‘It does,’ I said. ‘The accent. It tells us the accent is Russian. And that goes with the man in the car. The man who had the Dodge ready and out in the parking lot. I thought I recognised him, but I couldn’t be sure. I’m sure now.’

‘So am I,’ Johnson said, ‘I was wondering if you’d seen him. The man waiting for Rudi was Vladimir, your launderette Ukrainian from Winnipeg.’

Whatever they did to the Booker-Readmans, the kidnap demands got me into a tangle.

Arriving home from Missy’s Golden American Wonderland I wasn’t interested in anything or anybody but checking to see if Ben was in good running order. I lurched creaking up the stairs like a blackcurrant straddle harvester and barely noticed that Simon and Rosamund were engaged in the preliminary bouts of a magnificent spat. The words ‘Your pathetic Kraut’ rose to the surface several times, and after I had checked that my brat was safely asleep I slung my things off and went and had a good listen.

If I thought it was going to be about my call from Hugo’s office about the threat to their son, I was out in my reckoning. They were discussing Comer Eisenkopp’s invitation to spend Easter with them at Cape Cod.

Simon saw no harm in going and Rosamund thought he was out of his tiny mind, to put himself under an obligation to these people. Simon said it was pathetic Krauts like that who kept her mother going, and Rosamund said that if Comer and Beverley Eisenkopp thought they were going to get an invitation to the gala in Venice, they were going to be bloody disappointed. To which Simon replied that invitations to Warr Beckenstaff galas were Warr Beckenstaff business, and since when had her mother paid the slightest attention to anything her darling daughter said or did, except to do her level best to keep her from marrying anything less than a duke, until she had to get herself in pig.

‘Well put,’ said Rosamund bitterly. ‘I bloody nearly did have to do it myself. And now look what’s happening. Some hoodlum snatches her grandson, and there’s Grandmother’s fortune, gone for nothing.’

‘She won’t pay, darling,’ said Simon. ‘You’re quite safe. They’ll kill the boy next time and you can take Joanna on as your social secretary. However will they get their jollies at the Long Island Cerebral Palsy Fair without you?’

‘Don’t knock it. It does wonders for your image, Simon, if you’ll forgive the expression,’ Rosamund said. ‘On the other hand, helping the underprivileged has never been your thing, has it? If someone destroyed your looks tomorrow, what would you do? What
would
you do? Do you ever think of it?’

‘You mean you’d stop loving me?’ Simon said, and laughed. ‘My word, I can’t think what I’d do, darling. Or yes, I can. I think I’d have to run to Grandma for help.’

There was a little silence. Then Rosamund, in a voice drawling with rage said, ‘Of course you must do as you like. Don’t fail to explain, while you’re about it, how the Lesnovo ikon came to be smashed in the Eisenkopps’ bog.’

‘What?’ said Simon.

‘You’re so quick, darling,’ Rosamund said. ‘Joanna the paragon found it, along with Bunty Cole and God knows who else. Joanna brought it here because they thought it might be the lost ikon.’

‘And? ’ said Simon. His voice had weakened.

‘And I said it wasn’t, and burned it. It was a rotten copy, even for you. I shan’t ask the obvious question.’

‘You might as well. You’ll get the obvious answer,’ said Simon Booker-Readman. ‘I’ve no idea how it got there. Probably one of the children.’

‘Benedict?’ said Rosamund scathingly.

It couldn’t have been telepathy. But as Rosamund mentioned his name Benedict woke, and finding himself wet and unhappy and hungry, broadcast the fact, without delay, through the baby alarm. The sitting-room door opened and Rosamund came out.

I was three steps back, on the last tread of the stair when she saw me. I said, ‘I’ll see to it, Mrs Booker-Readman. I was just coming down to tell you I was in.’

Rosamund stood perfectly still. Below her long face and incurving hair everything was in the severest good taste: her cardigan, her ombre striped silk blouse, her wrap-around skirt and good shoes. She said, ‘I should rather like you to come and see me the moment you get in, Joanna. One likes to know just how many people are in one’s house at any moment.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to make sure Benedict was all right.’

‘I’m sure I don’t know how we manage without you,’ Rosamund said. ‘But he seems to have survived. We had a call from the police. Thanks to Mr Panadek, they found the getaway cars.’

The crying intensified. I had one foot on the upper step, but I took it down. ‘Cars? In the plural?’ I said. Hugo’s vigil with Donovan in the Sky Ride had paid off.

‘A Dodge, and another car with some sort of fancy elephant costume in it. They assumed a third car was waiting to take the three men away. The police think it was another kidnapping attempt which didn’t come off, since you didn’t take Benedict with you.’

‘Take Benedict to a fun fair? They must be crazy,’ I said. ‘But economical, at that. They could use the bear message twice.’

‘Sukey was taken,’ Rosamund pointed out. There was no sign of Simon. If she wondered what I’d heard of their conversation, it didn’t show in her manner, which was coolly non-affable, as usual. She said, ‘The police have advised us to get a bodyguard, and this we shall probably have to do. In the meantime, Benedict is not to go out. Do you understand?’

I understood. I was not to gossip in parks with other interested elements of the network. And Grandmother’s money was to be preserved as well as might be for better ends than paying Benedict’s blackmailers. I ran upstairs and picked up Benedict, who was crying real, glistening tears. Then he saw it was me, and delivered a chinless smile and I said, ‘Benedict Booker-Readman, you represent unpleasant, menial work with unsocial hours, and I am not going to get hooked on someone else’s incontinent bastard.’

He lay on my lap by the wash basin, his head turned to watch all my movements, and smiled, and cooed like a pigeon. It isn’t fair. It’s my last brat. I’m going to leave the profession. I’m going to turn into an old, unmarried lady who keeps retired cart horses.

The next day, Simon appointed his personal strongman for Benedict. It turned out to be Denny Donovan, which wasn’t too surprising, since he knew the job was going, I suppose, before most people. They gave him a room in the attic, and he moved in from his digs with a sleeping-bag, a moisture gauge, a light meter, some insecticide, an old army revolver and a can of liquid banana. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have employed him. But he was hefty, and willing, and cheap, and no doubt was expected to keep my mind off everything that wasn’t business.

Certainly, he was a revelation on the subject of plant doctoring. He had, he said, majored in fiddle leaf figs and was now fully qualified to make house to house calls including treatment and surgery. He could hold discussion groups for troubled plants and open clinics and sell records to grow them by. He was saving for a sunray lamp for a sick Mottled Bigleaf Periwinkle. It was so fascinating I was quite surprised when he mentioned the Wonderland, and observed that one of the getaway cars had been traced to a private parking lot belonging to Madison Square Garden.

It had been stolen, he said, the previous day, and from an area virtually inaccessible to the public. Which made it look as if Rudi Klapper, or the man I knew as Vladimir, or the unknown inside the Elephant outfit, or even all three, may have had showbiz connections beyond the scope of Missy’s Golden American Wonderland.

It seemed weak-minded to me, to steal a car from your own car park instead of a public one. But on the other hand, but for Hugo and Donovan’s sky spotting, the getaway cars would probably never have been found.

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘There’s to be a parade of Madison Square Garden employees wearing Saggy Baggy Elephant suits and pushing trash cans.’

‘Nope,’ said my ice hockey king, continuing with his current task, which was erecting illicit shelving. ‘They reckon that someone’s still hoping to entice Benedict out of the house, and that some time, you’ll be sent a couple of tickets for a kids’ show. Meanwhile, the fuzz are making like they know nothing of it.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Denny, Benedict is
nine weeks old
.’

‘Well,’ said Donovan. ‘It’s not all boxing at the Garden. They put on other things.’

‘No?’ I said. ‘He won’t stir out of his pram unless it’s a strip show.’

Donovan thought. ‘Well, if I don’t know what a kid that age wants, I guess they don’t know either. Hey, d’you know Mrs Booker-Readman’s Busy Lizzie’s got greenfly?’

I let it pass. As far as I was concerned, it was just a redress of the Balance of Nature. But two days later, I remembered that conversation when the Brazilian daily came in with a note from the Eisenkopps.

It was for me, from Grandfather Eisenkopp. In it, he said that he and Grover thought I would like one of the great American experiences. Enclosed therefore were four tickets for the forthcoming Okmulgee World Championship Rodeo at Madison Square Garden, and he hoped I would use them, whether to take kids or my own friends on an evening off. Yours truly, Elijah Eisenkopp.

‘There you are,’ I said to Donovan. The Eisenkopp fortune has nothing to do with their toy empire. It is founded on kidnapping. A Prussian branch of Mafia. Grandpa Eisenkopp is only bedridden because he got a low sabre-cut at a christening. He could have planned it. He knew how and when I was going with Bunty to Missy’s Golden American Wonderland.’

‘If he did, he also knew you were going without the baby,’ remarked my plant doctor.

He was not stupid, that fellow. Not entirely stupid, anyway. He phoned the police, and then he phoned Charlotte, who broke the news to Mrs Mallard that two nights hence she was expected to look after her own four kids and Benedict Booker-Readman for an entire evening.

No one told her the reason. On police advice, the Booker-Readmans and I were all going to the Okmulgee World Championship Rodeo with Benedict’s carrycot and a dummy inside.

I had heard of more original and even more sensible suggestions, but I was far from objecting to any device which might lead to nabbing our elephant friend or Klapper, or Vladimir. Or at the very least, a bareback Texas cowpoke for Charlotte.

1 wondered, after his burst of participation at the Wonderland, if Johnson would phone me in the next couple of days, if only to say he was glad to have known me. He didn’t. A boy friend of Charlotte’s knew someone who’d been to a dinner party he’d given at the New York Yacht Club, and someone else’s employer came home stoned from another at the Harvard Club at which Johnson had been principal guest. He had at least one sitting from Rosamund and two others that I knew of from Philly socialites. He was playing hard to get. So I went to the Rodeo on the strength of the only real piece of advice the Department had bothered to give me:
agree to everything
.

There are nineteen thousand raked seats round the big bran ring in Madison Square Garden, and the first person I saw down by the barrier was Gramps Eisenkopp in his sonic wheelchair. He was waving. An eighteen-year-old redhead in an Indian browband and braids sitting on the arm of his chair waved as well, giggling, and half the stadium waved back, hoping to make her neckline move half an inch to the right. Rosamund said, ‘My God.’

Simon said, ‘I think you should sympathise, darling. Imagine living in the same house as Comer with nothing but backnumbers of Rogue and Dude and Nugget to keep you going.’ He pulled down his shirt cuffs under the Dunhill hopsack blazer and leaned back in his orange seat. Rosamund was also dressed for the wananchi in a jersey print with a tie-hankie on her hair, and kept knocking the carrycot with her elbow.

Eventually I transferred it to my other side, next to the passageway, where it could be attacked more easily. Denny Donovan, who came in a bit later with Charlotte, leaned over the loge steps and cooed winningly at the wrapped shape of the china doll, before settling down across the passage. Charlotte in cheesecloth with oasis-green eye-shadow, peered under the hood and gave an even more realistic flinch. ‘I’m sorry to tell you, he needs changing, Jo. Want me to do it?’

Surrounded by hate from the adjoining spectators I said, ‘You won’t notice it when the cattle come on.’

There were two detectives behind us. I supposed there might be others, watching. I wondered if any of the Department’s men were about. In all the recent upheavals, I had never come across any. And tonight I wanted support, for I didn’t know what to expect. Nothing was going according to expectations. No one had attacked me. No one had laid a finger on me, even at Missy’s American Wonderland, with three accredited villains in the offing. Only Benedict had been threatened, in terms I couldn’t forget :

Mr and Mrs Booker-Readman, I have your son. He is nailed in a box, without
food
and drink
…

I had said to Simon in the cab, with the china doll in its box on my knees, ‘What if it’s a trick? What if it’s a plot to get Benedict out of the way while Donovan and the rest of us are sitting like fools at the Rodeo?’

‘Really, Joanna,’ had said Rosamund. ‘The police did think of that. They’ll leave a plain-clothes man with Mrs Mallard. Obviously, we have to have Donovan here, to convince people we’re bringing the baby.’

Obviously. Down in the front, Gramps Eisenkopp turned round again, flapping a Stetson, which he rammed on his head, grinning. His black wig, shifting a little, peered over his brow, but his broad, thin-lipped grin stayed unaltered. Charlotte, leaning over her Data-Mate, said, ‘He used to ride in the Cow Palace rodeos when he was young. Would you believe it? Bunty told me.’

‘Jeeze. Hence the Buckle Bunnies,’ said Donovan, interested. Pocahontas had been joined by two girls in curled hats and pointed lizard-skin boots and pink slip-ware faces. Rodeo groupies usually hung about behind the scenes, waiting for the best-looking bull riders. No one could call Grandpa Eisenkopp good-looking, but who cared, with those financial resources? I wondered what the socially sensitive Comer and his gorgeous Beverley thought of Grandpa’s hick past. If you believed Hugo, the brainstorm which removed him from active life had reached his relatives as one of the minor blessings from Providence.

I also understood why no one had been allowed to bring Grover.

Below us, the band struck up, the lights dimmed and the Grand Parade poured into the dazzling well of the ring. There were a lot of cowgirls, in hats and feathers and fringes and sequins, and quite a lot of nice looking cowboys and Indians, and some clowns. A Red Indian sang. I was aware of my confidence sinking as I looked at those clowns. Saggy Baggy Elephants and clowns: they have one thing in common. You can’t recognise them.