Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 (21 page)

“Why no,” said Mummy. “But I think your wooden framework would repay watching.” She put her finger along one of the printed wood slices. “Look, there’s a split right along there.”

I don’t know if she pressed it or if she dug her fingernail in. At any rate, there was a small creak. Then, slowly, in front of our eyes, the wooden boss swung smoothly open, revealing, nesting inside, a massive piece of brand new machinery, with the name
schuytstraat—amsterdam
printed on it. “Now that,” said Mummy, “is a Happening, if you like.”

I think for the moment he thought she’d done it by accident. I think perhaps he even thought he might get away with it, if the woman was stupid enough. He just didn’t know Mummy. While Austin was saying, “… not unlike Mitchell’s work: petal shapes cut out from boilers and tank ends…” she just kept on pressing. Three other sections of the exhibit swung open to show other pieces of plant, and by that time Austin had stopped speaking and was at the end of the room, with the gun back in his hand.

Johnson shoved back his hood. “Don’t be silly,” he said mildly. His glasses had got steamed up a little. “When you threw your blazer over, we took the bullets out of your gun… We seem to have the aural sensator, so you might as well tell me. Where are the rubies?”

Austin took a deep breath and let the gun drop. He said, “I guess… When I saw the machinery, I knew you’d blame me. You’ll just have to believe me. I didn’t know these things were there… How in hell could I know? I’ve been abroad.”

“You were in Holland,” said Johnson. “Just after the machinery was stolen. So was Lord Forsey, as it happened: that’s why Schuytstraat got hold of the wrong end of the stick. We know you didn’t steal them, any more than you were meant to touch those rubies today. Someone else does all that for you, and you simply act as a vehicle to anyone who will pay you enough for your trouble. One, the item is stolen. Two, it’s delivered at once to your gallery. And three, it leaves the country in due course, concealed inside one of your special exhibits.” He rapped his knuckles, smiling, against a hoarding studded with glued rope and metal. “You could carry anything inside these, couldn’t you? Hashish inside the quilts, chemicals in the bagged landscapes, microfilm or documents anywhere.”

Austin went liver color. “All right. That’s it,” he said, and began to walk forward. “I don’t know who you think you are, Mr. Johnson, but it’s obvious you don’t know anything of me or my work. Have you any idea what it costs to insure and pack and ship these exhibits from country to country? If I were in need of money, Mr. Johnson, as you imply, I should hardly be able to finance an undertaking such as this. As it is…” He stood face to face with Johnson—a big, clean, indignant man reflected in the bifocal glasses—while Johnson stood unmoving, like a Welsh soprano, the pointed cap clutched under his arm.

“As it is,” said Austin, “my work is philanthropic, Mr. Johnson. For the benefit of the whole of mankind. Mrs. van Costa, whoever she may be, was right about that. And I cannot permit pure, dumb, low-grade sensationalism to interfere with it or me.”

“Was that,” said the grating voice of Janey’s father, “why you attempted to pass this piece of stolen machinery off just now as a fine work of art?”

“Never mind, Mr. Lloyd,” said Johnson mildly. He hadn’t moved. “Spry spent the afternoon rigging a camera. Whatever Mr. Mandleberg did when he ran in here this evening will be most fully recorded.”

“Oh, really,” said Austin. “I’m not a schoolboy, you know. And I really doubt whether many portrait painters carry a night camera along with their brushes and a technician to rig it. In any case, where could it…” He stopped.

“That’s right,” said Johnson. He turned and strolled backward, then pausing, reached up an arm to the “Cumulus Cloud with Tartan Travel Case” and pulled back a zipper. Held within by an efficient structure of cord, the shining lens of a camera glittered down on us all. Johnson rezipped it and turned just as Austin, cornered at last, began to run for the door.

There were quite a lot of people in the room by that time, but he also had a great deal of cover. Austin wheeled and, overturning a heavy, self-colored canvas, dashed for the protection of a bank of lit double-skin boxes, containing large and significant patterns assembled in washers.

Gilmore was there. Austin attempted to turn, lashed out at Gil and got a kick which shot him through the double-skin window: the washers poured out like fruit-machine tokens, and Austin, twisting, made off this time and began doubling in and out of the lines of exhibits in the general direction of the door. He had nearly got to the end when a group of hooded men, jumping in at a tangent, neatly cut off his exit.

He was saved by one of the quilts. Ripped from its moorings, it burst on the struggling men, feathers shooting from every overstuffed symbol. Blinded, hood struggled with hood. Other hoardings rocked and came hammering down, to further the blizzards of feathers. There was a sort of heap of men on the floor. I saw Mr. Lloyd sprinting to join it, and then Gilmore. The hump of men zigzagged up, struggling, and overhead, a “Bagged Landscape” burst. The other works, rocked wildly by buffeting cowl peaks, hardly held out much longer. With a sigh, one by one, punctured as if by bayonet charge, the great bladders died, pouring upon the locked figures a long, sad, steady stream of cold, colored water. A spray of small plastic ships settled, like locusts, and one of the figures, detaching itself, suddenly rolled to its feet, shedding dolls’ eyes like aniseed balls, and made for the door.

It was Austin. Janey shrieked. I belted along one narrow passage of oscillating disks of shrill color, aware, out of the side of my eye, that one of them seemed to be moving. As I ran, I saw it detach itself: a thick eight-foot circle of spiraling yellow and pink, rumbling into deliberate movement. It was making straight for the door. I saw Austin look back once, his eyes white as single-spot dice, before he crashed through the doorway and jumped four at a time down the stairs.

I couldn’t have reached him in time, but the disk did. It thundered through to the landing and, taking off on the top step, sailed down through the air sideways taking my eyeballs, revolving, along with it. Austin had got to the bottom step when it hit him, and he didn’t even give a cry: just a grunt, as it dropped like a lid. He didn’t get up.

Derek, who had propelled it, stood beside me dusting his hands, with an expression of microelectronic satisfaction under his dripping wet hair. “As Paul Klee didn’t say,” Derek said, “art does not render the visible, but renders invisible. Let’s go and pick him up, shall we?”

It took three men to lift off the disk and get Austin back to the room. He groaned as we got him into a chair, and groaned again, a bit more, when he opened his eyes and saw the shambles of his Art in the Round. Johnson tied his hands to the arms of his chair and patted Derek on the back. “Well done. I don’t suppose you know where he’s hidden the rubies?”

“I’m a stranger here myself,” said Derek, who still looked as if he had had four gins in a row. It was the first joke I’d ever heard him make, which explains its unremarkable nature.

“Look here,” said Gilmore. We left Austin in the charge of a masked man who turned out to be Spry and walked through the shop to where Gil was kneeling, in front of a block of wood covered with steel wire and cotton reels, labeled “Maternity.” From the area of the right hip he twisted a screw and drew out a small drawer concealed in the thickness of wood. Beside me, Austin shook his head and sat up. Everybody craned over.

“What a pity,” said Johnson. “It’s empty.”

The shout from Austin distracted us from the movement we should have been looking for. Everyone looked round at Mandleberg, who was sitting forward tugging like a mad thing at his hands, shouting amazing Bronx epithets. I saw Mr. Lloyd and Gilmore look at one another.

I don’t suppose anyone really expected the first hiding place they found to be the home of the rubies. The whole collection was presumably honeycombed with secret pockets, large, small, and middling. It was perhaps coincidence or perhaps the fact that, in haste, Austin hadn’t quite rammed home the drawer which caused Gil to spot it. So it seemed to me then. In any case, there was Austin on the verge of a stroke, the veins bulging on his fair, well-scrubbed brow as he howled in a formless outburst of rage and mortification. Johnson came over and slapped him on the face, very neatly, with the flat of his hand. “Did you put the collar in there?”

Austin sobbed and, panting, got some words out. “Yes! They were there seconds ago! The effing bastard! The double-crossing…”

They were the last words he spoke. He was still honking when a spark of flame lit the far end of the room, and there was a sharp pop, a clang, and the zinging noise of a ricocheting bullet. Austin fell back in his chair. One of the steel chimpanzees developed a navel. And the final bagged landscaped, shot true in the belly, began to shed slowly out of its lining a drip of Bueche-Girod watches.

Austin was dead. I was looking at him, stupidly —the nice man who had held my hand on the plane to Ibiza—when the impact of a robed body knocked me back on my heels. A hooded figure, the gun still smoking in its hand, flung itself on me, twisted my arm hard up my anoraked back, and shoving me sideways began to carry me with it through the door and off down the stairs.

I saw everyone in the gallery stop moving, suddenly, and realized that if they hadn’t, I was going to be shot. I realized if I struggled, I was going to be shot anyway. The man holding me was powerful enough to drag me as far as the door before he had time to say “
Walk
!” and to make sure that I did walk by shoving the gun hard into my skin. I stumbled down the staircase beside him and discovered I was squealing, anyway, at the top of my voice. Above, I could hear Johnson’s voice shouting something, an order, in Spanish.

Ahead was the doorway, with an armed policeman in it. He must have heard what Johnson shouted. On seeing me, he dropped his gun and stepped back. Hauling me with him, the Penitent Brother dodged out into the street. Without conscious effort I was still shrilling like an alarm clock; my assailant stopped, for a second, in the dark, echoing street and clouted me once on the ear with his gun. “Be quiet.” I cut out, and with a jerk that nearly took my ball and sockets apart, he started to run.

A roomful of grown, bloody men, and a fat lot of protection they’d been.

Behind, I could hear people pelting down Austin’s tiled hall. Above, here and there, dim faces attracted by the brief screeching looked down, with interest, from the lit balconies. And in the street, one or two knots of people turned around.

The tricky thing was the gun. I could have yelled, or tripped the brute up, if it hadn’t been for the gun. I’m as strong as most men, though this one was big: bigger than a Spaniard, I’d say, and he’d spoken in English. The words, whispered, told me nothing at all. There was no smell of curry.

That, at least, had a negative value. It wasn’t Gil or his father, hastily got up in robes. It wasn’t Spry, because I’d seen him a moment before. It wasn’t Derek, because I know the feel of Derek, and anyway, he’d been the one who caught Austin. And it wasn’t poor Austin. It was someone whom Austin knew… an ally, a partner, who had robbed Austin, in turn, of the rubies Austin had stolen. And who had killed Austin to prevent his name being known.

We were running fast, dodging people, while I was thinking. My Penitent Brother had problems as well. He had to gain enough ground to get out of those clothes without being recognized. Until then, he’d need me as a hostage. Afterward, he wouldn’t want me at all. Living, that is.

I was gasping. The gun was now in my side, and it tightened when I made to look round. I couldn’t tell if the others were following. My heart was drumming: it seemed to me that bugles rang in my ears, that the music had come back, louder, with the hum of crowds watching. I suppose I realized at the same moment as my captor that it wasn’t a dream. It was eleven-thirty, and the Easter Procession of Silence was on its way back from the Monument, about to enter the Portal, and retrace its weary steps up to the top square again. In a moment, the road we were on was going to be crowded with people.

There were steps on our left, wide cobbled steps with trim marble edges plunging clean down into the dark below Austin’s handsome paved Calle de San Guillermo. The hooded man beside me shifted his grip on my arm and, swinging me round hard against him, drove me before him down the black stairs. I thought I heard, as we went, the sound of running footsteps behind. So long as pursuit stayed quite close, I didn’t see how this man could kill me. The moment he shook it off, he most certainly would.

We went down those stairs like two roller coasters, slewed right round the blank wall of a house, and debouched into a narrow, dirt lane full of uneven white houses with broken steps and poles of washing like ghosts over our heads. A low wall on the left showed, as we flew, a glimpse of tiled roofs, lights of the harbor, and distant hills black against the dark sky. It looked peaceful and free. Turning, I missed my footing and stumbled and for a second was dragged off balance down the black, stony track.

The lane was a cul-de-sac. The hand on my arm spun me round, and we reached the steps again and resumed the headlong rush downward, twisting again and again between narrow, high walls until we reached another flat, stony space in the darkness, lined with dim, peeling houses, their blinds rolled up over rusty railings, the windows all empty except, here and there, for a flickering light and the sound of a child’s thin voice, wailing. A wireless spoke, and a cat, surprised, made a high sound. I thought of the dead rat in the ditch, the night I met Austin, and shivered. The man with me slowed down and stopped. Then, pulling me, he melted into a deep, broken doorway.

It was very dark. A lantern fixed to one of the houses threw a limited light, like dust, on the ground, and a lizard, moving into its circle, rustled off into the rubble. The bugles, starting up somewhere not too far away, were like a sudden scratch on the nerve endings. I felt the man beside me jump too: we were both breathing hard, trying to subdue it, but not hard enough to drown the light patter of steps coming down the stairs we had left and continuing past us. They receded into the blackness below, and the sound vanished with them.