Moroccan Traffic (17 page)

‘Out for the count. Sit down,’ he said. ‘Whisky, or plonk? I’ve got both. And don’t whisper. He ought to come to life soon. He’s probably faking it now. Didn’t you know what his cigarettes were?’

I stared at him. Reefers? Daughter of my mother, I had never thought about drugs. Now I did think of them, they still seemed unlikely. I said, ‘They smashed his spectacles.’

‘He isn’t that blind,’ Morgan said. ‘They set him up. They got him doped. They hid dope on his yacht. They thought the road block would get rid of him finally. But it didn’t.’

‘Why?’ I said. My mother was still leaning over the bed, and the cocoon had a brief fit of coughing.

‘Because he had a sovereign pass from SM,’ Morgan said. ‘And he got them to ring through to the Palace. Do you think anyone would have Johnson arrested, and the portraits unfinished?’

No, they wouldn’t. Any more than Sir Robert, if he could help it. I said, ‘But the drugs on the yacht?’

‘He expected them,’ Morgan said. ‘He found them after you and the Canadians left. He put them—’

I saw it all. I was outraged.
‘In Sullivan’s Sunbeam
?’ I said. I sat up, rocking the drinks he was pouring. ‘Instead of MCG being blamed, the Moroccan police are accusing
Sullivan?’

‘You like Sullivan?’ said Morgan. He lifted a whisky and offered it.

He had one poured for my mother already.

‘He’s a Kingsley man!’ I said. ‘It isn’t right!’

‘Unless Sullivan planted the drugs,’ remarked Morgan.

I took the whisky. In the corner, the sleeper had embarked on another whistling cough. My mother straightened and turned. ‘Is this logic?’ she said. ‘This bum painter packs dope in his yacht. He smokes pot when he likes, knowing no one will shop him. He has the Killer Instinct to Win. He is an expert in Just-In-Time murders. He will throw off the bedclothes and kill us.’

She turned towards Morgan, holding her hand out for the whisky. Behind her, the world’s highest priced portrait painter unrolled from the blankets, made to fling them aside, and then hauled them up again to his shoulders. He said shortly, ‘Interfering foreign bastard.’

Mo Morgan grinned and laid down the drinks. From a thermos before him he poured a mug of steaming black coffee and walking over, fitted it between Johnson’s hands. He said, ‘You would have crumpled your trousers. Stop whining and drink it.’

Johnson looked at him without love. His eyes, though less blank, were ringed like a coaster. ‘
Christ!’
he said.

‘Or I’ll ring her,’ said Mo Morgan. He didn’t say who.

And Johnson said something unrepeatable and took and drank the coffee while Morgan stood over him. Halfway through, the mug began to tilt and Morgan thumped him. His eyes closed, Johnson finished it. He said, his eyes still closed, ‘You haven’t introduced us, Mr. Morgan.’

Morgan lifted the mug, pulled a sweater from one of his drawers and tossed it on to the sheets. ‘Nor I have. Mr. Johnson, Mrs. Helmann, Wendy’s mother,’ he said. ‘She thinks you blew up Kingsley’s, copied their documents and plan to get rid of us all.’

‘Bang on,’ said Johnson. ‘Goodbye.’

Morgan leaned over and thumped him again. I noticed the thumps were not hard, and Johnson showed no sign really of minding them. After a moment he felt for the sweater, and dragging it over his head, eased himself upwards until he was sitting more or less upright. Morgan said, ‘Come on. The drugs? Yours or not?’

‘Not,’ Johnson said. ‘Planted on
Dolly.
No idea by whom.’

Morgan poured his own drink, and then toasted me and my mother, who had slowly seated herself. ‘And the papers?’ he said.

‘Oh, copied those,’ Johnson said. ‘For what they were worth. But didn’t actually kill anyone. Or kidnap Pymm. Or, be it noticed, hang about in the carpet shop until Miss Helmann came up with the figures.’

‘Why?’ I said.

Johnson half-opened his eyes. ‘In case Pymm heard them, of course.’

‘But you hope,’ said my mother, ‘to force her to tell you them now.’

‘Of course,’ said Johnson peacefully. ‘You are my prisoners.’ His skin was steamed up, and his eyes were like Liquorice Allsorts, and red at the edges.

My mother frowned at him, although I knew her maternal instincts were behaving like Rottweilers. She said, ‘Well? You hear what he has admitted? Call the police!’

‘Doris?’ Mo Morgan said. ‘He’s so full of drugs I doubt if he could get out of that bed, even if he wanted to throttle you now, which must be a common compulsion.’ He waved his whisky at me. ‘Didn’t you guess? Never experimented with pot? And it wasn’t just pot. He should have flaked out on the spot. He certainly shouldn’t have been able to bring you back to Marrakesh. They’re on the lookout for you, Wendy.’

‘Who?’ I said. I didn’t understand my new role as maiden to Johnson’s flaming St. George. I said, ‘He needn’t have smoked them. I could have come home with Seb Sullivan.’

‘You could,’ Mo Morgan said. ‘But Napoleon here wanted to keep your address secret.’

‘From Colonel Sullivan?’ I asked him. He knew, as I did, that Sullivan was a Kingsley man.

‘From Ellwood Pymm,’ Morgan said. ‘Don’t you think that would be sensible?’ He was looking at Johnson, whose eyes were still open.

‘Pymm? He’s Press. I suppose so,’ I said. I remembered something so silly I didn’t want to repeat it. I said, ‘Who did kidnap us? Does anyone know?’

Morgan didn’t reply. Johnson said, ‘I’m not up to talking.’ He looked, for my money, to be returning quite quickly to the status of professional prig.

‘Yes, you are,’ said Mo Morgan. ‘Tell her what you and I decided. Who would want the figures Wendy knows? MCG: but you’re their best friend and you didn’t use the occasion to get them. Who else? Someone from the financial press, someone in public relations, someone representing a raiding company, with an eye to a takeover. Any one of these could have set that up directly, or could have employed some agent to do it for them. Johnson thinks the agent, for whatever boss, was Ellwood Pymm.’

I had thought Johnson was drunk when he said that. He was only out of his skull with some dope. I said, ‘Why? They were going to knife him. You heard them.’

‘But they didn’t,’ Johnson said. He had made a laborious desk of his knees, and was separating it from his head with his fists. He said, ‘I pushed them as far as I could, but they didn’t touch him. We had only their word that he knew the figures. We’d only their word that he’d been caught with the Fax and resisted them.’

‘The blood!’ I said. ‘He was covered with blood!’

Johnson looked up through the slits in his lids. For the first time, there was more coconut showing than liquorice. ‘Did you see any gaping wounds, or even a flea bite? It wasn’t his blood. The truth was that Ellwood Pymm didn’t know the new Kingsley figures: how could he? He had just staked himself out to make you admit them.’

There was a short interval filled entirely by breath. ‘There’s no proof,’ I said. ‘I mean, the blood is no absolute proof.’ My mother rolled and lit a cigarette, her eyes never leaving the bed. No one spoke. I thought of Ellwood on the floor of the warehouse. I thought of his stupid cropped scalp, and his persistence, and his maniac phrasebook. It was true, it was the phrasebook that had told us where he had been. And from that spot, we had been brought to the warehouse.

Johnson said, ‘You’re right; the evidence is on the weak side, but there is some. I dropped the carpets towards him, and he woke and dodged them amazingly quickly. And the bully boys didn’t guard him. He was awake, and unbound and their hostage, but they abandoned him to come after us. And he did nothing about it. He just waited for us to be recaptured.’

Morgan said, ‘He would have to set it up. How would he know Wendy was going to Essaouira?’

I thought about that. Sullivan knew: he was taking me. But he wouldn’t tell Pymm. Sir Robert knew, and had mentioned it, in an oblique way, to Lady Kingsley. My mother knew. She had ordered a five-course breakfast (extra) the previous night to be delivered (extra) by room service at dawn by the same waiters who served Ellwood Pymm. I said, ‘He’d know from the hotel. He could have had all night to arrange it. And he thought, of course, Mr. Johnson was safely painting.’

‘Yes,’ said Mo Morgan blandly. ‘Amazing that, how everyone thought Mr. Johnson was safely painting.’ He stared at Johnson, and Johnson failed to stare back.

I said, ‘But a columnist wouldn’t trouble to set up all that.’

‘No,’ said Morgan. ‘Not unless he was being paid a great deal especially to do it.’

My mother rose. I had never known her stay silent so long. She stalked to Johnson’s bed, pulled up a chair, and sat down, her knees apart, her cigarette exuding smoke at her lip corner. Johnson didn’t cough, but I could see it was an effort. She said, ‘Then who was paying him?’

She looked like a Mardi Gras grotesque. She was wrapped, as she always was, in clashing bright colours, and her hair stuck out from under her various headscarves, and her eyes were like Old English bottles. From the moment he began to come to, Johnson had treated her with absolute indifference. Now he dropped his hands to his knees and let them dangle. He looked terrible.

‘Who would want to take over Kingsley’s?’ he said. ‘You tell me, Mr. Morgan. Pymm’s American. He’s only attached himself to a Canadian subsidiary. When you and Miss Helmann meet Sir Robert tomorrow, it’s your American competitors you ought to be studying.’

Miss Helmann. It had been Wendy, twice, in the warehouse.

‘Interfering bloody Wasp, aren’t you?’ Morgan said. He had coloured up, which I had begun to recognise as a mark of elation. He poured three more drinks and took another coffee to Johnson. ‘Are you telling us how not to be taken over?’

‘Why not?’ Johnson said. ‘The devil you know. Whoever takes over Kingsley’s might give MCG a tougher battle than you would.’

‘If Pymm was really the spy of a raider,’ said Morgan.

‘What else? Who else?’ Johnson said. He sat palming the coffee and watching not Morgan, but my mother. I couldn’t understand it. My mother coughed, and tapping her cigarette into her small, grasping paw, glanced at Mo. And as if invited, Mo Morgan answered.

He said, ‘The fellow who’s trying to buy me.’

‘Buy you!’ Johnson exclaimed. It was the clearest thing he had managed to say since Essaouira. He said, ‘Who? How could anyone buy you? I thought Kingsley’s had tied you in with a funeral package? I thought they’d take you to court and strip you down to your paddock boots if you so much as re-read your contract?’

In the respectful silence that followed, my mother heaved herself to her feet and rolled placidly in between chairs, folding Mo Morgan’s T-shirts and pairing his socks. She opened a drawer, tut-tutted and lifted out two Marks and Spencer shirts, heavily crumpled. She dropped them on the floor, capped all the spirit bottles and, opening the thermos, examined it and carried it over to Johnson who kindly allowed her to refill his mug. ‘The direct self-surgery of capital restructuring,’ she remarked. ‘Going for debt, to create added value for shareholders.’ Johnson lifted his eyes.

I knew what she was saying. What Mr. Morgan had described was a buyout proposal. Someone was keen to persuade him to take his original company back from King Cong and rejoin the unquoteds. Privatise it again, in other words.

And in one way, the lethargic Mr. Johnson was right. This was tricky territory. Mr. Morgan was stitched to Kingsley’s by an extremely tight contract involving a long term earn-out and all the usual measures. But sometimes – just sometimes – extraordinary ways could be found round that little problem. And the loss of Morgan’s division would be catastrophic for Kingsley’s, and twice as catastrophic if MCG also dodged us. The truly villainous element suddenly hit me. I said, ‘Does Sir Robert know about this? I don’t suppose that he does.’ I said it standing, and coldly.

‘Wendy?’ my mother said. ‘Managements’ buyouts is sensitive business. And we’re talking real product, not fruit-flavoured condoms and bubble baths. This is Mo, the cream of the microprocessor intelligentsia, building a personal juggernaut of research. He’s been approached to take himself out of Kingsley’s. He’s playing it cool: he won’t commit himself till he has his next meeting. The party who’s making the offer could be behind all them carpets, and Mo did the right thing when he warned you. And what will Sir Robert get? A personal feedback from you, Wendy, as soon as there’s something to tell.’

She had prepared another broken-backed cigarette and was lighting it. It came to me that my mother and Mo Morgan had already spent the evening conducting an on-site seminar on Kingsley Conglomerates. Using three well-tried methods, I controlled my emotions. I said to Morgan, ‘May I put it this way? You are privy to your company’s secrets. To fail to report such an offer is a breach of your professional obligations.’

‘I swear,’ said Mo Morgan, fanning the smoke out of his way. ‘I swear I won’t tell the new figures to anyone, not even my shrink. Sweetheart, I’m not holding out on the Board. I just wanted to wait and see who the optimist was.’

I stared at him. ‘You don’t know?’ I said.

‘Nope. I don’t know,’ said Morgan. ‘It could be General Electric, Lech Walesa or Junk Johnson here. Whichever, he or she is dealing through a third party.’

‘It seems to me,’ said Johnson, reviving vaguely, ‘that Mr. Morgan, in a way, has been rather crafty. Sir Robert will want to know who is wooing his long term meal ticket, and if we can keep it all quiet, there’s quite a good chance of finding out. Otherwise we’ll have to rely on seeing who kidnaps you next.’

He was feeling momentarily better. I could see the spark, unimpeded by spectacles, in his eyes. It was not reassuring. ‘In any case,’ I said to Mr. Morgan, ‘you can’t go to the Mamounia meeting tomorrow. You’ve an interest in MCG now.’

‘Have I?’ said Mr. Morgan. Arm on chairback, he was twirling his pigtail, his glass-holding hand on his knee.

Johnson said, warming, ‘Of course you have, don’t be silly. If you really plan to buy back your outfit, then your strategy will partly depend on whether Kingsley’s succeed against Rita.’