Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (18 page)

“Lovely. Wasn’t it?” said Johnson. “Acoustic switches are my absolute buzz. Come in and have a drink, Wallace. I’ve got some Glenfiddich somewhere, I think, if the bastard has left it. Did you wonder where that hatch was going to lead you?”

“I knew where it was going to lead me,” said Wallace. “But thanks for the let-out. I was just too bloody nosy for the good of my skin.” He looked at me. “I suppose you thought I was a burglar?”

“She thought you were whoever has just slithered off with her arsenic tests,” Johnson said. He gazed at Brady and Brady looked down, embarrassed. “My God,” said Johnson with interest. “Did you think we were conducting an orgy in four-ply? We just came in, and the room was like forget it. Hallelujah!” He pounced. “The survival kit.”

He put the whiskey down, assembled the glasses, and disappeared into the bathroom for ice. I clapped my hands slowly, twice. The light went out, lingered, and came on again. Wallace Brady was sitting in an attitude of extreme discomfort, looking at me. He said, “I want to apologize.”

“Not at all,” I said. “It must all have sounded quite extraordinarily odd.”

He said, “You can hear quite clearly behind that damned hatch.”

“I know,” I said.

Brady said, “Do you think I took the papers? I could have.”

“So could Krishtof Bey and Sergeant Trotter,” I said.

Johnson came in with the ice and Brady walked over to him and said, “There’s something I’m just not too clear on. You said downstairs this morning that all this wasn’t an accident. Then you told us all that Beltanno had proof that it wasn’t. I just wanted to ask you why you had to shoot off your mouth about Beltanno? Doesn’t that expose her to attack by the murderer?”

“How funny,” I said. “I wanted to ask him that too.”

Johnson handed around the drinks, sat down, and looked at him, his bifocals twin circles of blankness. “I’m being paid by Mr. Tiko,” he said. “So that he can inherit three million dollars.”

For a moment I think Wallace Brady believed him. I was almost more irritated with him than I was angry with Johnson. “Don’t be stupid,” I said snappishly. “Mr. Tiko inherits the chieftainship, and I’m quite sure my father will see that’s all there is to inherit.”

“Even if your father marries the Begum?” said Johnson. He put down his whiskey and began comfortably filling his pipe. “That’s quite a lot of loot to get rid of, even if he invests in government stock. Anyway, who’s complaining? You sold me up the river to Krishtof Bey and look what happened. My underwear is exposed. And we are both sitting targets.”

“Tell the police,” said Wallace Brady.

It was good advice. Good, sensible layman’s advice which Johnson was in no position to take. I thought of that row with Edgecombe yesterday, at Great Harbour Cay.
If someone’s after you because you’re an agent, then he’s taking his time about it for a very good reason.

Edgecombe was the sprat. Johnson, if not the whale, was at least the halibut. I watched Wallace Brady, who was sitting sipping his whiskey with his pale eyes on Johnson. Johnson said, “I’m not going to get mixed up in it, children. Bad for business. You tell them, Brady.”

“Right. I shall.” Brady got to his feet, kicking a space in Johnson’s dog-eared possessions. He wore, with some distinction, the Bahamian undress dress uniform of casual silk shirt and light trousers.

“But you’ll have to wait until four-thirty tomorrow,” Johnson said.

It doesn’t do to underrate Johnson. Of course: No telephones, and fixed-schedule radio telephone facilities.

It didn’t do to underrate Wallace Brady either. “That’s all right. I’ll borrow the launch first thing in the morning,” he said. “And do it from Great Harbour Cay. Or I could fly to Nassau if necessary.”

Johnson, peacefully smoking, was still undisturbed. “So you could,” he said. “I wish we had the evidence to send with you. But you could take Doctor MacRannoch. After all, she’s got to explain why she sat on it for so long.”

Brady said slowly, “I’d forgotten that.”

So had I. I must stop drinking alcoholic drinks prepared under doubtful conditions.

Wallace Brady kicked a couple of shirts out of his way and strode across to stand over Johnson. “You don’t want the police, do you?” he said. “It would spoil the leisurely high-society image. Dirty little men running over the Begum’s nice holiday island; maybe taking you off to a crowded hotel room in Nassau, or forcing you to stay and give evidence in some stuffy court. Beltanno doesn’t matter. Or Edgecombe.”

“Well, honestly,” said Johnson, taking the pipe out of his mouth. He looked slightly pained. “If Edgecombe’s an agent, then the last thing he wants is the police. We know that already. And if I don’t testify, and Beltanno testifies without evidence, your rushing off to Nassau will do precisely nothing but create an unholy mess, for Edgecombe and Beltanno most of all. Particularly if Edgecombe denies he ever told her he was an agent, as he is extremely likely to do. You see, there’s no solid proof.”

“Yes,” said Brady. He was pallid with suppressed anger. “There’s no solid proof. I didn’t take Beltanno’s arsenic notes, Johnson. What if Krishtof and Trotter didn’t steal them either? What if you emptied your own drawers and scattered your own papers just to save yourself trouble? Where are the notes, Mr. Johnson? In your pocket?”

“Good God,” said Johnson. He rose slowly, pipe in hand, to his feet. Wallace Brady was half a head taller.

“Turn out your pockets,” said Brady. “Or I’ll turn them out for you.”

Johnson put his pipe down. “Look,” he said. An expanse of exasperated glass turned first on Brady, then on me. “A minute ago everyone was urging me to burn the damned things. I’ve just told you. You can’t use them without harming Beltanno.”

“I know. I don’t want to use them. I just want to show you up, Johnson Johnson, for the selfish British bastard you are,” said Brady. I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make sense, any of it. It didn’t make sense, unless Brady wanted these papers himself. And had looked for them. And had failed to find them.

I stared at Johnson and Johnson, bemused, stared back at Brady; and Brady, with a grunt of exasperation, lifted his strong golfer’s right hand and lunged.

I clapped my hands.

For a moment the instant darkness took them both by surprise. Then I heard the
thwack
as their frames interlocked.

Grunts, like whispers, are impossible to identify in the dark, and so is hard breathing. I retreated to the fireplace and listened as the struggle unrolled its course over socks, trousers, and papers, yelpingly up to and over a drawer and momentarily into the base of a lamp. There was a crash, but clearly of the wrong caliber. Brady used a short, pithy word and I heard Johnson laugh annoyingly. Then the bumps and wheezing started again.

They must have been evenly matched. Neither ever got disengaged for long enough to manage a clap. But one of them contrived to get a single hand free.

They were close to me, on their feet and still pantingly wrestling when the pistol went off. As the light came on I saw it drop from Brady’s right hand, but he wasn’t quite quick enough. Before he could bring his fist up to defend himself, Johnson had hit him.

It was nicely judged. I wasn’t going to have a broken jawbone to deal with. Wallace Brady merely followed one shoulder down into a pile of old Pringle sweaters and lay there, while Johnson went through his pockets. He got up, his respiration fast but quite even and observed, “He hasn’t got them either. All the same, he made an awful fuss to cover up not going to the police, I thought. Didn’t you?”

“I was too busy dodging,” I said. There was a fresh bullet hole to the right of the fireplace, just a foot above where my head had just been.

“He just wanted the light to come on,” said Johnson blandly. I could see his eyes. They were ordinary, with white circles around them. I said, “He’s smashed your bifocals?”

“What? No! No,” said Johnson, and fished out a maroon leather case from his pocket. He extracted and put on the lenses. He added, “I take my teeth out as well.” I would have respected him had I not been well aware that his teeth were his own. It struck me to wonder how in the course of that fight he had found time to case up his glasses. I remembered why I had followed him to his room. I said, “Right. I have something to say to you.”

Johnson knelt and correctly rolled up Wallace Brady’s left eyelid. Nothing was taking place under it but the doll’s-eye movements of the deeply unconscious. Johnson got up, put his pipe in his mouth, and wandered over to sit in a chair. He struck a match. “You want to know why I told all, after we had agreed that we shouldn’t,” he said.

I said, “I don’t need to be told. You’re using me as your ready-rigged bait.”

“Bright girl,” he said, without so much as taking his pipe out of his mouth. “All right. Now suppose you triumph over hysteria and enable us to move on to a stable host-parasite relationship. What, so far have we hooked?”

I looked at the wall over my head and sat down with deliberation. “Wallace Brady,” I said. “You know all I know about that. And Krishtof Bey. You will find it extremely hard to believe the latest news there.”

“You know me. I’ll believe anything,” said Johnson. “Tell me all you think I’m fit to be told.”

But he wasn’t disturbed. At the end of my pungent if expurgated recital, he merely said, “Yes. That’s more or less the scene as I heard it.”

I don’t know how I got on my feet. I said, “What the hell do you mean?”

“What you think I mean,” Johnson said. “You’re bugged, your room’s bugged, and there isn’t a move you make around the house or the garden that Spry or I aren’t watching. You may be bait, but you’re barbed bait. Don’t worry, Doctor. All you have to do is enjoy yourself.”

I thought of the four-minute kiss. I said, “You bloody little cold-bellied
stinkpotter
.”

“Oh no,” said Johnson, looking hurt. “Blowboater or ragwagoner if you must.” He got up and pressed the hatch and began lugging Brady’s inert body toward it. I suppose he was going to search Brady’s bedroom as well.

I stood and watched him. I could go to the police. I could go back to the hospital. I could leave.

I couldn’t do anything and still remain Dr. B. Douglas MacRannoch. I was a responsible citizen who had been enlisted by a high-grade professional. On the other hand, if he was painting Krishtof Bey by the pool, how the hell did Johnson expect to hear what happened or didn’t happen all the time in my bedroom? I stopped dead with my hand on the door and said, “A
tape
?”

Johnson was watching Brady’s non-slip composition soles and heels smoothly recede through the hatch. “
Rolls out on wheels for easy clean
,” he observed. He straightened. “Yes, a tape. But I edit it,” he said. “In fact, some bits of it I really don’t hear at all. And whatever else I have done or not done to you, Doctor B. Douglas MacRannoch, I think I have shortened your shelf life.”

I slammed the door, but being the Begum’s door, it closed with a click.

I couldn’t find the bug. I undressed with the radio roaring and fell asleep to the strains of Tchaikovsky. I will narrate none of my dreams.

FROM THAT MOMENT until Edgecombe’s arrival five days later, I contrived to remain, with some trouble, intact. The social life in fact became so prodigious, it was quite hard to keep one’s attention on murder.

The house filled up and emptied and filled up again. The Begum seldom had fewer than twelve bedrooms occupied, and parties of twenty or thirty were common for lunch, the visitors flying over to Stirrup Cay or Chub Cay or Great Harbour Cay and being met by the Crab Island launch. In the afternoon they would swim or engage in some other form of sport; in the evening those who were not staying returned after dinner. They came from New Providence and Miami, Eleuthera, Andros, and Abaco. Occasionally a friend would fly up from Jamaica or Antigua, stay a night, and return. My father, I saw with amazement, organized their entertainment with the same single-track vigor he had always displayed toward the MacRannochs. Many of them, indeed, were MacRannochs. He showed no hint of bronchorestriction.

As I have perhaps mentioned, I have myself little time for trivial chat. The European group tourist and the American convention component I had found it best at all costs to avoid, unless lying before me on the operating table. The young and fashionable I had also found suspect. In fact, I had a number of theories I thought it better to keep to myself.

At James Ulric’s level, the level of Coral Harbour and Lyford Cay and Grand Bahama and Great Harbour Cay, the Bahamas are an expensive holiday playground. If you can afford it and are young, I would observe to myself, it is often because your wealth derives from your physique, which seldom makes for intellectual sparkle. If, on the other hand, you have made your fortune by unremitting juvenile industry, you are unlikely to have had time for anything else. Few self-made young men of twenty-three are entertaining outside their own subject.

There remain the offspring of the rich: the unattached and young marrieds who holiday in the Bahamas at the homes of their parents, their aunts, and their godmothers. These, I always found, cultivated a wide range of interests, like mustard and cress, on grounds about as profound as wet blotting paper.

I avoided them. I avoided the middle-aged rich from both business and society. These stayed with private hostesses or built luxury holiday houses, in which they entertained the same friends as at home, mixing tropical sport with drinking and horse racing, bridge and canasta. Some of these I had occasionally been persuaded to partner at golf. I had seldom been disappointed when the relationship was carried no further.

All these came to the Bahamas in high season only. Among the permanently retired, stultifying in the sunshine at a low regulo setting, I had found nothing in common. Indeed, the only human vigor I had ever been able to find had come from those, native or incomers, who worked on the islands: The bankers, the doctors, the tradesmen, the seamen, the vast teams of engineering contractors who were creating islands such as Great Harbour Cay.

I had, I believe, mentioned all this to Johnson when he first suggested visiting Crab Island. He had denied none of it, which raised him a degree in my estimation. Indeed, I hardly know when I began to notice that my pilot groups had perhaps been too small.

Brady, of course, if not a murderer, was an American engineer engaged in his profession. He played golf. He was quiet, entertaining, and had at least attempted to black Johnson’s eye on my behalf. In fact he had been more than cool to Johnson ever since.

My feeling was that if Johnson’s elaborate protection had begun without my permission, it could proceed without my cooperation. It was up to Johnson to keep me out of danger. So when Wallace Brady asked me to play tennis with him, I played tennis. I swam. I allowed myself to be taught several card games. Flexibility could go no further.

Krishtof Bey was also a professional. He had made money early but he was also intelligent and of varied interests, possible subversion apart. His advances continued, but were in the nature of flattery and not alarming to handle. I was a little careful when Krishtof Bey sought my society, but not because I was afraid he would kill me.

By the same token, if Rodney Trotter was a murderer, I have never yet met a better masseur, nor a man who with greater clarity could teach me to water-ski. He even got aqua-lung equipment and wanted me to go scuba diving, but Johnson, whose launch we were using, regretfully vetoed it. I saw the point, even if Trotter did not. But I made a reasonable success, for a beginner, at skiing.

The Begum’s other guests astonished me also. The first rich young socialite I met was an international skier and also a banker; the second had launched a chain of dress shops and just held her own one-woman painting exhibition. Among the self-made was an actor now equally known as a novelist; and a folk singer who has also made some excellent short films.

There were almost no mustard and cress, no juvenile millionaires, no elderly playboys. All were engaged in some form of creative work with several others usually running it close. All could talk. Among the older men and women were dramatists and businessmen and art collectors, farmers and landed proprietors actively and experimentally involved with their property; an American medical specialist I had long wanted to meet. Members of the administration from Nassau and the other islands came out to visit the Begum, and she blended them all into a comfortable mélange in the warm sunshine so that they talked and swam and relaxed, comparing notes and exchanging ideas, and at the end of it, left the island themselves in some way enhanced.

Conversation, to my surprise, was not arduous. None displayed any but a literary interest in my given name of Beltanno. By evening each day, instead of being footsore and exhausted, I was physically relaxed and mentally fresher than ever. My skin became brown around the new shapes of my swim and sun suits, and between my tie-on tops and my hipsters. In the evenings we had drinks: daiquiris, Tom Collins, rum punches, and long, slow dinners by candlelight out on the terrace with French wines instead of iced water, and music, and paper games, and dancing. Krishtof Bey and Johnson between them taught me how to dance in time with the music and then how to dance out of time with it. No one mentioned his or her feet.

I remarked on that once to Krishtof Bey as we walked along the white beach after dinner, having sent on its way another launchful of the Begum’s departing houseguests. He said, “Perhaps the Begum’s friends do not need free advice.”

It was warm. In the dimness, the thin waves breathed in and dwindled on the smooth sand. I said, “No. That isn’t the difference. People who want free advice almost always earn far more than I do.”

“But you frighten them,” said Krishtof. He stopped, his voile body-shirt glistening in the dark. “People who are not articulate, how are they to know what to say to a woman doctor? Especially a woman doctor with a stern face, who plays golf, and does not wish to be kissed?”

I realized I should not have let him walk me away from the others. But one cannot really remember to be cautious all the time. I said, “Of course, I always tell them that as soon as I meet them.”

“They sense it,” said Krishtof. He ran the back of his hand down my arm and my reflexes bounded. “So they think, what will interest this so austere woman? Only her own business, medicine. What can I say that will interest her, and will also be of some interest and benefit to myself? Ah. This remarkable and unusual symptom, they say, that I have observed in my feet…”

I said, “You flatter them.” The drifting fingers were caressing my neck.

“No,” said Krishtof. I wished he didn’t use quite so much Monsieur Balmain: it was making me dizzy. “No. You despise and therefore underrate them. I do not agree, this rich diet the Begum is giving you. How will you have patience, when you go back? Not everyone is witty and fluent. Some are just nice, inarticulate people.”

“Like you,” I said. I tried to move away slightly but his other arm had gone around my waist.

“You wish to be sarcastic. But I am nice,” said Krishtof Bey cheerfully. “I do not rape you when we first meet. I wait.”

I said, “I appreciate that. I think we should go back to the house.”

He had stopped walking, but the hand around my waist had not relinquished its grip. “There are people at the house.”

“I know.”

“But I do not wish to rape you before people,” explained Krishtof Bey.

“That,” I said firmly, “makes two of us. Back to the house.”

There was something magnificent about that man’s psychosexual development. He didn’t trouble to answer. He merely tightened his grip and shifted his system of leverage so that I fell slowly backward on the white sifted sand, my bare shoulders cool in the surf. Then he kissed me.

“Hullo,” said Johnson.

I did not at first hear him. As before, rapid chemical and psychological changes appeared to be happening. Certainly I was beyond responding to quite painful stimuli, and uncoordinated eye movements were threatening. Krishtof Bey’s open mouth continued to adhere to mine, although I could hear he was growling. A minor wave washed over both of us sideways and splashed Johnson’s moccasins. He said admiringly, “Steam.”

I could feel Krishtof preparing to get up and hit him. Johnson said mildly, “Don’t stop unless you’re inclined. The tide turns in an hour and a half. Actually, the Begum and James Ulric are coming along just behind me.”

Krishtof Bey got up and gave me a hand to rise to my feet, but all the time the slanting black eyes were on Johnson, and he was smiling. I distrusted that smile. So apparently did Johnson. I can give no precise account of what actually happened, but one smooth movement followed another smooth movement, and Johnson entered the ocean in a dim shower of spray, followed immediately and without premeditation by Krishtof Bey.

The Begum and James Ulric walked by as they were picking themselves up. “Beltanno!” said James Ulric sharply.

“Yes, Father?” I said from the shadows.

“Are those two lay-abouts falling out over you?”

Krishtof Bey and Johnson, rising with uniform dignity, could be seen making their way out of the sea. All at once it seemed purposeless to withhold the truth. “Yes,” I said.

Moving up, my father peered closer. “Are you drunk?”

“No,” I said.

“What happened to that fellow Broody I offered seventy-five thousand to marry you?”

“That was Wallace Brady,” I said. “I told you. He’s somewhere about.”

“You’re drunk,” said my father grimly. “You’re high. You’re out of your mind. You think you’ve got so many dangling you can afford to let two of them
drown
?”

“Why not?” I said. “I’ve got Mr. Tiko.”

“I’ll believe that,” said my father, “when I find myself inside the Silver Bells Wedding Chapel, Reno, toasting you both in Gold Nikka. I warn you again. You marry that bloody Nip, and I’ll cut you off with a yen.”

“He’s a MacRannoch,” I said. The moon had moved around a trifle, but I didn’t care. I was drying off a bit, anyhow. I didn’t know where Johnson and Krishtof were. The Begum stood smiling but offered no comment. She didn’t need to, with James Ulric batting.

“In bloody name only,” said my father, between his straggling teeth. “They eat raw fish. They speak Japanese. They all bathe together, with geisha girls scrubbing their wee yellow backs. They have bad eyes and lead unhealthy lives.”

“Mr. Tiko plays better golf than you do,” I said.

There was a silence. “That’s a lie,” said James Ulric.

“It’s true,” I said. “Wallace Brady will tell you.”

Wallace Brady, the builder of bridges, like all builders of bridges, was sacrosanct. There was another long silence, and then my father started to wheeze. I had to go into the house for his isoprenaline, and his Forced Expired Volume per second had gone up by a quarter already. It was the first attack that he’d had since the winter, and I thought it a pity. Because I couldn’t hypersensitize him against Mr. T. K. MacRannoch.

Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe arrived the next day, which was Friday; and, although excessively quiet, was at pains to merge in with the household and to make no demands on the Begum. He spent a good part of the evening ruminating over the jigsaw, in which the Queen of Sheba was now seen to be stepping out of an Alfa Romeo. Afterward he went off to bed rather early, although I noticed he called on the way at Johnson’s door, and was there a long time. I wondered what they were hatching. Whatever it was, Edgecombe looked tired when he came out. He had lost a lot of color and weight in the last week, and had had his hair cut. I suppose it was Denise who had thought it dashing, hanging over his collar.

I make no apology for taking a close invisible interest in Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe. I had no doubt by this time that whatever was going to happen to him was going to happen to me. And with his arrival, my available protection was halved.

But what everybody appeared to have forgotten was that I was due back in Nassau on Tuesday. After three more days no one could use me as bait or anything else. I should be away from the scene. I should be Dr. B. Douglas MacRannoch, Scotland’s contribution to Unisex.

Three weeks ago, I wouldn’t have known what that meant, far less bringing myself to apply it.

I wish it were three weeks ago.

No, I don’t.

Next morning a small extra briskness in the calm air of the house was the only sign that the Begum was expecting seventy-five people for an afternoon beach party and barbecue. My father, who had quarreled with her over the guest list, locked himself after breakfast in the study, from which sounds of industry emerged from time to time. The original box file marked The MacRannoch Gathering had now bred a stack of fat folders, with titles like
caber, steel band, highland dancing, cherokee indians, piping, commando raids, columbus, community singing
, and
fire dancers on motorcycles
. The date, I had noticed, was now only five weeks distant, and the guest list ran to three thousand names, with mine at the top:
Beltanno
.

He must have been stoned out of his crust.

Krishtof Bey never came down for breakfast. I had mine. I asked the Begum, who was lying in a lounge chair, if I could help with the barbecue, but of course with a staff like the control center at Cape Kennedy she said no and meant it. Rodney Trotter suggested fishing and I got my swimming things while he collected some live bait for amberjack.