Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 (22 page)

We waited, and I thought, “This is it. Goodbye, Sarah.” A shot through the heart—the crochet wasn’t going to offer much resistance. And then my Penitent Brother, whoever he was, would merely peel off his Penitent clothes, walk up and mix with the crowds, in his usual identity. I felt the hand on my arm beginning to relax and his other hand, his gun hand, lift and alter its grip. A voice, calling, said “Cassells? Sarah!” from below; from the foot of the steps. Not near enough to come back and spot us. But too near for murder.

The man beside me said something under his breath, and the hand on my arm tightened, and the gun muzzle moved back again to my side. Then he said “Run!” in the same eerie, hoarse whisper and set off, pulling me, up to main street again.

Just now, I had been lucky. This time, his luck was in. In a burst of torchlight and music, the procession had reached the end of the calle but only just. The drumbeat echoed: Tuck, Tr-r-uck, tru-uck, truck, tuck; and the sound pattered, like shuttlecocks, back and forth along the double row of fine houses. We didn’t wait for the crowd. My hooded friend ran before it, deeper down the dark street, and found the steps he must have been seeking, I realized, the first time. As the main road curled steeply up to the left, a stepped, cobbled lane led downward, past big houses set at different levels, with double doors and light shining bright through their fanlights.

Perhaps I hesitated as we passed. Certainly the gun hurt my ribs, grating against my side as we went, and the hand on my arm was hot and soaking with sweat. The steps were wide, sweeping down between white walls covered with roses. Their scent came plain as the bugles in the quiet night air, and through a wrought-iron gate you could see a garden, the lace-work of a trellis, a glimmer of water, and the sparks of two cigarettes being smoked at ease, under the palms. At the bottom was another narrow dirt lane, with a row of low white houses facing us to left and to right, flowers on their deep sills. A lantern, glowing dimly, showed an orange bead curtain, still swaying, and on the left, a bastion of the old wall, on which stood a Gothic gallery, with arched windows and massed flowers in pots. We swept past it and into an unpaved square with a concrete pump in the middle. Two men, talking in low voices, stood beside it and watched us, with curiosity, as we strode past. A Penitent Brother, called away perhaps in emergency, by his wife or his daughter. It was no use calling out. Not with the gun there.

There was a choice of two lanes. He took the darker one, always sinking, bending down through cobbled steps to the right; taking the right again when it forked to shrink to almost nothing between tall, broken houses, with netting hung in the doorways and the glimpse of a chair and a curious face, here and there, just inside.

On the right was a yard: part cobbled, part dirt, part cement. Broken tiles lined the high doorsteps, and the doors were warped and weathered pale silver, and the windows were broken, rusty, and barred. A falling building, propped up by timber, leaned across a flight of worn steps leading downward, past locked doors and blind, netted windows. The steps disappeared into darkness: only I could see a greater darkness arching over them, and I guessed that they entered a tunnel, made by two joined buildings above. A tunnel with no open doors, no prying eyes in it. The gun moved, and I was driven to the steps and down toward it.

I think, perhaps, I would have attempted to trip him. I certainly was going to scream. I knew this branch of the Cassells line had pretty well come to an end, but I didn’t see why he should rat out of payment. I had my mouth open when I heard the running footsteps again far behind: spaced out, as a man runs when he is taking two, three, four steps at a time. Fast enough to overtake another man before he can disrobe. The grip on my arm propelled me suddenly again into motion, and I saw that the tunnel was just a short archway and that it stood over a perpendicular flight of black steps, whose lower reaches were flooded with clear yellow light.

It led directly into the main square of the Dalt Vila, with the Portal framing the end. And curling round the archway and up the steep cobbles on its way back to the Cathedral were the torches, the shuffling figures, the jerking, flickering litters of the Procession of Silence. The main exit to the low town and safety was closed.

The man beside me looked round. There were people in the square: quite a lot of them. There were people, too, in the steep street to the left which ran, I suddenly remembered, to another gateway, the New Port, on the west. I wondered why we didn’t make for it, and then saw the lamps glittering on the folded black hats of the police. My captor moved and, then without warning, strode straight across the lit square and through the space between two houses opposite. It was wasteland and dark. I stumbled, trying to keep my footing, and was hurried across ridges of half-broken wall and piles of crumbling earth in a darkness which was almost total. Behind, over my shoulder, I caught a glimpse of the lights of the square and the gap through which we had come, empty of following figures. Ahead was a great blackness topped by a dim, irregular line: the wall of the battlements of San Juan, overlooking the town. Above it, the sky was full of stars.

It had been a mistake to look up. I missed my footing in earnest this time and, tumbling forward, fell head over heels down a steep, earthy slope, landing in blackness, all the breath knocked clean out of me.

There is no aid like cowardice in a quick-reaction alert. I got to my feet while my robed friend was still coming and made off like a hare.

I was running, I found, in a ditch. It was man-made and excessively deep, and the sides were formed by slopes of sieved, heavy, dry earth, down one of which I had just tumbled. I tried running up them again. It was like trying to climb into the top of an hourglass. I wasted time on it, while the thudding footsteps behind me got closer, and gave up and sprinted, as fast as my shaking sinews would make it, along the foot of the ditch.

It ended in a blocked tunnel. Just that. Why, I never knew. I never knew either what they were building there, or laying, or why they wanted a tunnel at all. I just knew I ran into it and turned, cornered, and stood motionless, my pent-up breath mewing with exhaustion, while he groped all over the blackness, coming closer and closer. I made a break for it in the end, running headlong for the dim mouth of the tunnel—the way I’d come in.

I fell. As he flung his full weight on me, I thought the roof of the tunnel had caved in. Then I saw his black robe fly up, and his foot came over, hard, pinning mine.

All the penitents I had seen wore black shoes. All the holiday-makers I mixed with wore light Spanish shoes in fine leather or suede. The man gripping me now, and heaving me up, breathing fast, grunting, with the gun in his hand, wore neither of these. He wore sneakers. White canvas sneakers, liberally stained with grass and with salt.

I stopped struggling, and he dragged me upward; the grip on my arm became sickening. I heard him draw breath to tell me: this is the end of the road.

“Clem, don’t be silly,” I said.

I DIDN’T really believe it myself, until I felt his arm sag. I was nearly sick, then. Flo would have been sick.

I said again, “Don’t be silly. We all know who you are.”

“You’re lying,” he said. It was Clem’s voice.

“I’m not,” I said. Steam was coming out of my brain. “Jorge and Gregorio are in Mummy’s house. Johnson took them there.”

“You’re lying,” he said again, and his voice had got three notes higher.

“I’m not,” I said. “How else do you think Johnson knew there was another replica of the Saint Hubert collar? He only wanted you to betray yourself.”

I wasn’t sure, even then, if what I was saying made sense. All I knew was that somehow I had to make him believe that Johnson knew who he was. That way, there was no need to kill me. That way, he needed me as a hostage for a little while yet, because he couldn’t just go back to
Dolly
and pretend to have been there all night, lying faint with a bump on his head. (Who had done that? Austin?) Somehow, Clem Sainsbury had to escape.

You could see the thoughts going through his head as, automatically, he started to move once again. The hand with the gun had come down, but he hadn’t released me. He had only shifted the point of the gun from my head to my back. Then we stood in the entrance of the tunnel and waited.

It was very quiet. Over the wasteland and beyond the sides of the plaza, you could hear the intermittent sounds of the procession: the tiny bugles, the flat thud of the drums, marking all the slow stages. Soon, when the Portal was clear, Clem would try to get through.

Clem. He had taken his hood off and now, maintaining his gun carefully in my ribs, he was dropping his robe. No need for concealment now: not from me. If I was telling the truth, it would make no odds with Johnson, either. And if I wasn’t, he could bluff. He might even, gun pressed in my side, misdirect the hunt. So I suppose he was thinking. He didn’t say anything. And in the dark I could make out almost nothing: just the humid heat of his bulk, his short hair sticking with sweat above the pale blur of his face, and the raucous sound of his breath. He said suddenly, “What a pity I can’t trust you, Sarah. Damn you, why can’t I trust you?” His voice was like a boy’s, petulant; and he pulled me with his gun hand close, hard to his body, so that his mouth was close to my cheek. He licked my ear.

I nearly screamed. I drew in my breath with a shrieking whisper, and stopped the sound as he jerked off, groaning with anger, and brought the gun butt across the side of my head. A lot of lights sprang about in front of my eyes, and I lost my balance; when I got over it, I was leaning against the cold side of the archway with the hot, hard grip still on my arm, but there was space between us again. The drums had faded.

“The next time,” said Clem, “I’ll scoop your brains out like seeds from a melon.” He seemed to enjoy the expression. Then we started moving again.

I had had a hope, I believe, that he would try to emerge in the square and that the police would stop him. How I thought this would save my own life, I don’t know. I don’t remember being concerned by much except a desire to see him under lock and key. At any rate, he didn’t even look at the square. He walked instead along the ditch and back up to the wall of the battlement. He followed it, walking carefully, round all its points until it took two left-hand turns and came out, incredibly, above the roofless square of the chamber which lay just inside the Portal de las Tablas, the main gateway of Dalt Vila.

There was no float there now: jammed blazing under the balcony. There were no policemen either; these were all in the square. I saw Clem’s teeth flash in a strong, healthy smile, and he said, “You managed to follow me up, darling. So you shouldn’t find it too hard to get down. Just take my hand.”

And the next moment we were through the low door, scrambling down that damned creeper.

The ramp down to the market was empty but for a child or two, laggard to bed, and a disbanding family party. There were plenty of lights, and in the town groups of people turning away, to catch a bus, to have a last drink, to talk with chance-met friends. White-robed penitents, having delivered their image, were gathered chatting outside their church, a litter of flowers at their feet. Inside the church, a priest was dismantling the palinquin. The lamps were unscrewed and the Virgin’s gown had gone, disclosing the rusty metal of the two heavy batteries. A girl of about six, with pigtails and a frilled blouse and a round Hapsburg chin, was fooling about with a palm leaf. We hurried on.

No one looked at us: the brawny young man and the girl he was holding so closely. And yet, I supposed he had the Saint Hubert rubies in his pocket. I said, “Where are you going?”

He couldn’t kill me here: not unless he were cornered. But if he were cornered, I thought, he would do it, out of sheer bravura and hate. You would have to hate people to kill as he must have killed… Austin. Coco. Father.

He didn’t answer. But suddenly, as the silence continued, as we made our way to the quayside, I knew where he was going. He had to get out of Ibiza. No man could hide on an island. No plane would take him. But there was a boat which would take him very well…

Dolly. Dolly
, with her powerful engine, sitting unattended in her berth, along by the yacht club.

By the quay, he found Mummy’s Humber, parked there by Dilling through the gentlemanly offices of the chief of police. The keys were still in it. Clem stopped, drew a breath, and then, flinging me in by main force, got the thing started and the gun again in my side before I recovered. Moving like a runaway hearse at a funeral, the Humber thundered across the wide space of the quayside and along to the right, on the road to the clubhouse. Clem drove all the way without changing down, with one hand on the wheel, and made the turn into the yard of the yacht club at the same speed, putting both feet on the pedals with such force that I was nearly flung through the windscreen. Then he snapped up the handbrake and motioned me out.

The gates were shut. For a moment I hoped they’d be locked and realized, then, that they wouldn’t be. Men living on boats could hardly be held to a curfew. In fact, Clem heaved at one of the new, silvery leaves and, pushing his gun in my back, forced me through. Then pushing me, he began to run down the steps and along the quay toward
Dolly
.

We passed them one after the other, the beautiful boats with the yacht-club hieroglyphics:
kyc; nrv; cni
, and the orange and blue nylon ropes. Boats whose owners liked swimming and sunshine and had no need to count time. Those who could leave their offices, if they had offices, to fly to the Med and take on a casual boy, the son of a friend, a student down for vacation, and float with a party of friends—a bridge four, a drinking party, a sex foursome with congenial wives—from port to port and island to island, while the weather went along with the whim. I knew all the names. I knew some of the people. Daddy, probably, had known them all. We came, running, to the bollard where
Dolly
was berthed…

And
Dolly
was missing.

I heard Clem’s breath go in like a whistle. He looked round, heavily, like a bull. Had she changed berths? Was she out at a mooring? Was she sailing?

I looked at him. It mattered to me. Pushed to the end of his nerves, he was unpredictable. I didn’t know what he might do. I couldn’t see
Dolly
either, not anywhere: although we ran back along the whole frontage, desperately, and then retraced our steps. He stood gazing at the space where she’d been, his eyes black and open, as he wondered if he’d gone mad. Perhaps he had. His face was heavy and unlined, without any real stamp of living, as it had always been. I had envied him his lack of anxieties, in the simple, open-air life he had chosen. I hadn’t realized that, perhaps, his brain didn’t accept normal worries, that its scale of reference was quite different.

He stared at the water, and then for the last time he turned round, and I turned with him. We both saw
Dolly
, I think, at the same moment.

She wasn’t in the water at all. She was lying, her masts sloping above us, in the boatyard, and she was moving slowly as the chains pulled her up: up to where a blinded horse walked in a circle, loading the core of the winch.

I think then Clem went crazy. He left me. He dropped even his gun and ran through the gate, scrambling into the boatyard past tar barrels and lumber and tarpaulined boats. Then, seizing the horse, running after it as it shook its head and tried to jerk free, he tried to get it to turn, to reverse the laborious circle and unwind, so that the chains would slacken and
Dolly
would slip back into the water again—the life-giving water, where his only hope lay.

He was on the horse, urging it, when the Maserati flew down the road, and Johnson piled out, with Spry and Dilling and three Spanish police officers, hanging on by their eyebrows. A moment later, the Buick came along too, driven by Gilmore, with his father and my mother in the back. I didn’t see what happened as they streamed over the weedy sand into the enclosure: I had stopped looking as soon as Clem got near the horse. In fact, I think I was crying, in horrible, great, uncouth gulps, when Mummy came over the rubble, picking her way with her flounces hitched up round her calves, and sitting down, proceeded to fish out and light a cheroot. She said, “Organized games: I never could go along with them. I didn’t tell you, She-she at the time, but I got real worried when St. Tizzy’s made you captain of cricket. If your body’s all that healthy, I reckon there’s something gone soft in your mind. Look at Derek. He was never the same after those nut cutlets.”

I swallowed. I don’t know why Mummy doesn’t talk like other people. I said, “Oh, for Pete’s sake. I suppose you’d prefer Coco.”

“But that proves my point,” Mummy said, taking her cheroot out of her mouth. “Think of the tennis. The fact that he was doped to the eyeballs doesn’t make all that difference.”

I said carefully, “I’m not sure, but I think you’re saying Coco was soft in the head?”

“Well, he’d have to be, to let me keep him, dear, wouldn’t he?” said Mummy. “He poured all the rest of himself into his concrete, poor darling. To die young is not always a sorrow. Look how fat your gym mistresses always used to become.”

“But you don’t want to kill off my gym mistresses?” I said. The running, the scuffling, and the subdued shouting had retired in the direction of the yacht clubhouse. “Where would we be without all those chest-developing exercises?”

“You wouldn’t have had to wear your girdle under your armpits during all last year’s fashion,” pointed out Mummy, with justice. “The healthiest people are those who never think of their health.”

“Well, Christ, they don’t need to,” I said, “if they’re healthy. They’ve got leisure then to stir up trouble sticking their noses into other people’s business. You don’t find hypochondriacs staging a thirty-six hour sit-down protest in sleet outside the Central Iguanian Embassy. Or Olympic medalists, either.”

Mummy stared at me. “There’s no such place as a Central Iguanian Embassy.”

Johnson’s pipe glowed, suddenly, in the dark close beside us. “But there ought to be,” he said. “If you’ve finished the cross talk, Mr. Lloyd has kindly offered to run us all back to his house for a meal.”

“He
what
?” I said, straightening my knees.

“Oh, hard luck, She-she,” said my mother, shaking the dust from her flounces and rising, cheroot holder extended, to touch me absently on the cheek. “I don’t suppose it has struck him that you’ll have to cook it. If you would bear in mind my small problem. My diet doesn’t permit me to take any fat.”

“Your
diet
,” I said. “Did you say your d…?”

Mummy’s stare would have impaled a lizard. “Beauty,” she said, “and symmetry. To have regard for the case of one’s instrument is a matter of simple aesthetics. I believe we are summoned.”

She stalked off into the darkness in the direction of the cars. Johnson tucked his arm around mine. “High-speed wander in the steering-unit,” he said. “But the engine’s terrific. Come with us and get drunk.”

I cooked the dinner. Everyone was hollow-eyed and sickly, except Johnson, and they kept coming and patting me, which was sweet. They really needed a good meal. I wasn’t feeling frightfully Spanish, so I warmed up some thick lentil soup and fried them bacon and eggs. The bacon wasn’t fearfully appealing and the eggs were the usual, like Ping-Pong balls filled by a fulmar, but it was something like home. I switched on all the lights in the dining room and pulled all the blinds, and if I’d had an LP of Elgar, I’d have put that on too. Then I banged on the gong.

There were only seven of us: Janey and Gil and their father, and our three guests, Derek and Johnson and Mummy. Mummy had taken off all her flounces and was wearing a Jean Harlow thing Janey had bought in Neiman Marcus once for a lark: it was floor-length pink, edged with white swansdown. She is so damned sure of herself, she made her entrance quite straight: just glided in puffing cheroot smoke and sat down, without being directed, on Mr. Lloyd’s right. Janey, balked of her little amusement, glanced in Gil’s direction and sat down also, making a face. She had changed into a sort of light trench-coat dressing gown, and both Gil and his father had polo-necked cashmeres and slacks. Comfort was what we all wanted. I’d had no time to refurbish at all. Gil looked at the crochet thing as I brought in the soup, and getting up, disappeared and came back with a cardigan. It was Janey’s best, made of white cashmere with pearls and a mink collar, and I put it on, keeping my face straight as well. Johnson, who was wearing the same as he’d worn all day, put his pipe in his pocket and also came and sat down.

Mr. Lloyd finished handing round very large whiskeys, and sat down heavily, at the head of the table, saying “Now, Johnson,” in a definite voice. Ever since he had spotted that Johnson had something basic to do with it all, he had been very hard to put off. When we’d finished exclaiming, we’d all been inclined to badger Johnson on the way home, but he had remained uncommunicative and calm. “It’s a long story, and I’d rather tell it all at once and to everyone at the same time. Wait until we get in.”