Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 (20 page)

We were standing a few doors along from Austin Mandleberg’s Gallery 7, where the replica rubies had been produced.

WE ACTUALLY PAUSED for a moment outside poor Austin’s door before going in. To the street, the house was dark and perfectly silent. Austin, of course, was in the Lloyds’ house still convalescing and by now, no doubt, thankfully slumbering. As far as the Lloyds were aware, the men who made the fake necklace, Jorge and Gregorio, were out of the country; to my knowledge they were not, but at least they were in Johnson’s keeping.

In this house, therefore, must be the man who had stolen the rubies tonight: the hooded figure who had exchanged blows in the smoking mess of the float and then bolted; the man who had murdered my father, as well. Someone touched me on the back, and I made a sound like tearing paper: a large, well-kept hand was pressed over my mouth. “Shut up. It’s all right,” said Gilmore Lloyd. “We’re all here more or less, inside the door, and we think the chap we want is bottled up in the gallery.”

“You might have come out sooner,” said Janey furiously. She didn’t seem to be frightened.

“We hoped you’d go away,” said Gilmore simply, and shoved us in through the door.

Inside, it was not perfectly dark. The lights to the big showroom were off and also the lights in the basement, where Gregorio’s rooms and the ill-fated workshop were. But in the office, the room at the top of the stairs where Johnson and I had illegally entered, a dim light seemed to be burning, and there were more lights round the corner, from the other door on the landing, which led to the exhibition of Art in the Round.

Around us on the tiled marble floor, doing nothing, was a fair-sized group of people, most of them hooded and masked, although here and there I saw a perspiring bare face, and one or two that I knew: Mr. Lloyd’s, Gilmore’s—and suddenly— Derek’s. In the midst of the Ku Klux Klan, I suddenly felt calm and perfectly confident. Of course, they were all waiting to make sure all the exits were guarded. I smiled at Mr. Lloyd, who looked absolutely clean through me, just as a low whistle sounded from the door of the office. With some reluctance, the gathering shuffled its feet and then moved, slowly at first and then with gathering momentum, toward the bottom of the stairs.

I suppose the first two or three had set foot on them when a door opened straight across the small landing and printed a square on the wall. In the middle of the square, Janey and I now observed, was the shadow of a tall man, standing upright and still in the center of the gallery doorway, with a gun in his hand.

“These are private premises,” said Austin Mandleberg’s voice sharply. “If any one of you moves a step further without my permission, I shall certainly shoot.”

Austin!!! Presumably he’d gone off his rocker. I started to move to the corner, but Janey was even quicker. She sang out, “Austin!” and dodging round to the foot of the stairs, was three steps up before anyone managed to stop her. She said, “Don’t be an ass, it’s us. Father and Gil and She-she are here. We’ve just brought some friends.”

“Oh,” said Austin. He lowered the gun and said stiffly, “I’m sorry, Miss Lloyd. But since no one knocked or rang before entering… People get excited as you know, at these times, and the police are busy. Premises are sometimes entered and rifled.” He looked green. His ribs were probably giving him hell.

“I see,” said Mr. Lloyd dryly, “you were protecting your property?”

“Naturally,” said Austin. For a moment, he stood on the landing, just glaring at us; then he wiped his free hand on his stunning cord trousers and stepped back, stuffing the gun in a pocket. “I beg your pardon, sir. I’m not maybe right at my best. Come in. Please. Thank heavens you called out to me, Janey. You see, I just got to thinking of this after you left, and the more I thought, the more I got worried. With Gregorio absent… So—I hope you’ll forgive me—I took out the Maserati and ran here just to make sure everything was all right.”

“You must have had a hell of a job,” Gilmore said. “Getting the car through these crowds.” He finished climbing the stairs and walked into Gallery 7. We all followed. “So this is your traveling show?” His gaze took in the quilts, the Perspex, the colored circles, and the printed sections of wood and traveled slowly upward to where “Cumulus Cloud with Tartan Traveling Case” was rocking gently, spurred by one hood point succeeding another.

“That’s it,” said Austin. He walked across to the large oak dresser which occupied most of one wall, and took out some sherry and glasses. He glanced back at the doorway, where most of the hooded figures, embarrassed, were standing on one another’s shiny black boots. “Do come in, all of you.” He was too well-mannered to ask a direct question; but the query in his voice was quite something. Since his own clothes were spoiled, Gilmore had lent him a high-necked twill shirt and a blazer, a little tight over the shoulders. He added, “You must let me make up at least for my unfriendly welcome. Was the procession a hit?”

“Mr. Mandleberg,” said Mr. Lloyd. Janey crossed the room and, tucking her hand into Austin’s arm, said, “Let me hand those out for you. Oh, Daddy, never mind those boring old rubies. Have a drink.”

Austin turned. “What rubies? There hasn’t been trouble?” He shouldn’t have been out of bed, really. He was a sort of pale biscuit color, and his hair looked unkempt, like a rattan chair in a cat’s home. Janey got her hand away, at last, to take some glasses across to the hoods.

“They’ve been stolen,” said Mr. Lloyd. He paid no attention to Janey. “Another collar, a copy from God knows where this time, has been put on the statue. There was a fight on the float, and we all followed a man here. You didn’t see him?”

“
Here
?” said Austin. He put down the sherry bottle. “What did he look like?”

“He was dressed in a hood,” said Mr. Lloyd, staring at Austin. “You didn’t see or hear anyone?”

“No!” said Austin blankly. He took a grip of himself. “Hell, you can search if you like. In fact, I think that you’d better. If anyone’s hidden in this house, I’d sure like to know it. Do you think he’s still got the rubies?”

“I think it’s likely,” said Janey’s father. “We’ll look for those too. If you’ve no objection?”

“None at all, sir,” said Austin. He grinned a pale grin. “Maybe you’d like to search me as well.” And before anyone could stop him, he pulled off his blazer and slung it across to Janey’s father, and then proceeded to turn out every pocket until the linings were showing. He had beautiful Swiss handkerchiefs, a croc wallet and handfuls of pesetas, and bennies, plus a key ring with a very authentic-looking scarab attached. There was nowhere else he could have carried anything so large as that collar. Mr. Lloyd got a bit red and said, “There was no need for that, Mandleberg, but it was very decent of you to do it. Gil, come on.”

Half the room emptied. One or two people began crawling around the gallery itself, and Austin, after some hesitation, packed the stuff back into his pockets and got into his blazer. Janey said, “Well? We’re waiting for the rest of those sherries,” and he smiled at her and began pouring again. A voice behind me said “She-she,” gently.

I hate those hoods, and if I hadn’t known it was Johnson, I wouldn’t have let myself be drawn gently backward and halfway down the stairs. “It’s going rather well, don’t you think?” he said. I could see the bifocals, flashing behind the slits in his hood. “Where’s your brother?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Janey said she saw him at the top of the wall. After the rubies were whipped. How did the dogs…?”

“Aniseed,” said Johnson simply. “Brilliant, don’t you think? Will you do something for me?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Nothing to do with Derek,” he said. “Would you go down and watch for your mother? She ought to be here about now.”

“Wearing a hood?” I said acidly. I didn’t know what on earth Mummy had to do with all this. I thought of something else too. “Were you the man who punched the other chap on the flat? The chap we’re looking for now?”

“No,” said Johnson. “That’s the other piece in the puzzle. The man who got punched ran in here. The man who punched him must have dodged into a doorway when he saw half the town about to catch up with him, and let us go by. My guess is, he’s here now, too.”

I said it in the end; but don’t think it was because Janey and he were drinking out of the same glass. “Austin’s got a pink patch on his chin.”

“I know,” Johnson said. “Look. Here’s Lady Forsey.”

She didn’t have a hood, but she had a bloody mantilla, with a comb and a rose stuck through her urchin gray hair, and a red dress covered with white spotted flounces, slit right up to the knee. She had gorgeous legs; she still has. “Hi, darling,” she said. “Where’s the action?”

I said, “Oh for
heaven’s
sake. You didn’t stand watching an Easter procession all dressed up like that?”

“I had the best seat in town,” Mummy said. “The chief of the Guardia Civil is an old friend of mine. The dress was a present.”

“You wear it on
Sunday
,” I said. “I promise you. The poor old chief must have been sitting in agonies.”

“I hope so, darling,” said Mummy, admiring her kneecap through the top of the slip. “I’ve got a police pass for the rest of the holiday, and I’ve donated the van Costa Trophy for the best turned out Guardia Civil with more than eight children. I smell sherry.”

“In here,” said Johnson. “Sarah, take her in, will you? I’m sure she’d like Mandleberg to show her the exhibition.”

“What,
now
?” I said. “In that getup?”

“Every color blends in a garden,” said Mummy, and striding forward, cocked a hip in the doorway. I edged past the elbows and said, “Austin: you remember Mrs. van Costa?”

“Of course,” Austin said. With the ease that all those years and years and years in college always give to Americans, he advanced without blinking once, kissed Mummy’s hand, and, in a voice in which there was only the faintest trace of despair, said, “You’re most welcome, ma’am. Would you do me the honor of taking a small glass of sherry?”

Mummy smiled silently into his eyes, bridging the generation gap like a harpoon from a whaleboat.

Her technique hasn’t changed one little bit; in a way I suppose that it’s ageless. “If its manzanilla,” she said, her eyes still wide open. “I hate gluey sherries.”

It wasn’t manzanilla, of course; hardly anyone stocks it, but he wasn’t thrown in the least. He found and poured her a fino and handed it over, doing a great line on vineyards. To my surprise, Mummy listened entranced, and sipping the fino, said, “Delightful,” into his eyes. He tore himself away to give a drink to Gilmore and Mr. Lloyd, who had just come back, and one or two hoods who had also wandered in. Mr. Lloyd gave the thumbs-down sign to Janey. No man and no rubies. Austin said, “I don’t know if you all know Mrs. van Costa? Why don’t we all sit down? I’m sure you gentlemen would be much more comfortable without that cloth on your heads.”

“But they mustn’t!” said Mummy. “Don’t you know it’s forbidden to unmask before the floats are all back in church? Mr. Mandleberg, I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate the splendid work you are doing in placing the creations of these talented boys and girls before the public they deserve. Marshall Cheeseman has long been a close and dear friend of mine, and I have watched his work mature from a minor art to the bagged landscape with chickens, which I see you have hanging there now. I have the honor also of knowing Mackenzie Hall-Bassen since he set up his workshop in New Orleans, and I have seen his art flower into those marvelous shapes: so strong, so virile, so refreshingly clear of the mainstream of current art thought. Mr. Mandleberg, you are performing a service to aesthetic man.”

Austin’s eyes lit up. They really did. He put down his sherry, and advancing, said, “Mrs. van Costa, I have some things here which even you may not have seen before. There is an example here of what I might call a condition of dynamic equilibrium, a sensory experiment with light waves with induced emotional and intellectual response, which has the organically disturbing function of the greatest discoveries. When you see these items, you know yourself, Mrs. van Costa.”

“Indeed,” said Mummy, hitching up her frills and threading her way after him through the banks of exhibits. Her flat bottom waggled. “As the great Paul Klee once said, ‘Art does not render the visible, but renders visible.’ What is your opinion of the Blaue Reiter school, Mr. Mandleberg?”

She was in her element. It was the stuff that drove Daddy to drink. At my elbow, Johnson’s voice said, “Let’s follow.” Mr. Lloyd had sat down, and Gilmore was picking, moodily, at a canvas covered with nails. The sucking noise of sherry being imbibed reached us from a number of hoods. I walked, with Johnson beside me, down the gallery after Mummy, and Janey came with me. “It’s Johnson,” I said; but she didn’t answer. She was looking at one of the man-sized circular boards painted in those stomach-turning concentric bands of bright color. Beneath it, you could see Derek’s shoes, still all stained with seawater from the Salinas harbor. I kicked her, and she said, belatedly, “Oh? In the hood?” Luckily, Johnson didn’t seem to be paying any attention, and we all stopped within earshot of Mummy engaged in putting pressure on the dollar.

They were standing in front of the board with the rows of round wooden slices, and Austin was telling her the significance of the words stenciled on each. She seemed to understand him. I think she probably did understand him, which is a comfort in a way. I mean, it’s nice to know someone does. He had just moved on to something else and was saying “… abandoning figurative painting for a lighter and gayer construction, of piping and mesh…” when Mummy said, “Mr. Mandleberg?”

He turned back, still pointing onward. “Mr. Mandleberg,” said Mummy, “the condition of this exhibit seems to have altered a good bit since I last saw it in Boston. Are your people keeping this gallery humidified suitably?”

“Er, no,” said Austin. He didn’t come back. “So close to the sea, Mrs. van Costa, there’s no need for that. Certainly, as it travels about from country to country, one cannot always ensure that packing and transport conditions are all that one would make them oneself. Certainly, I always personally inspect the galleries that they go to, and many of them, as you know, are my own. But I regard the risk of a slight deterioration as being part of the price one must pay for bringing this unique and brave exhibition before the philistine world. You wouldn’t have me stop it on that account, Mrs. van Costa?”