Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 (10 page)

BOOK: Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05
5.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

I said, “You’ll find out if you go to Capri at three p.m. on November twentieth and look for S.M., whoever that is.”

“Shall I?” said Johnson. “We don’t know where to go, or who to look for if we did. Mr. Paladrini may not be there this time: the appointment may be between two perfect strangers. No. There’s only one way to be certain, and that is by watching who buys the balloon.”

“Fine,” said Innes, turning back from saying “In a moment” again to the neighbors. “If you think Mr. Paladrini is going to come back here, blow up a balloon and then proceed to the agreed place to sell it.”

“Along with the mechanical mice,” Diana said, a sign that her interest was dwindling.

“I feel,” Johnson said, “that Mr. Paladrini has blown up his final balloon. But there seems no reason why we shouldn’t do the job for him.”

“Us?” Innes said.

I said, “We don’t know when and where to take the cart. Assuming the cart is still there where he kept it.”

“Yes, we do,” Innes said. From among the litter of paper on the table he picked out a sheet from a notebook. On it, in rain-smeared Italian, was what appeared to be a rough timetable. He conned it. “Wednesday…?”

“Nothing for today,” said Johnson, looking over his shoulder. “But tomorrow… Tomorrow, my children, you have a full day ahead of you. Look at it. The Colosseum, the Piazza San Pietro, the Castel Sant’ Angelo…”

I said, “Look at the Castel Sant’ Angelo. There’s a number against it. Twelve. Do you suppose…?”

“That the cart was intended to be outside the Castel Sant’ Angelo at midday tomorrow, with the balloon prepared to hand to its new owner? I do,” Johnson said. He turned to face the oncoming prow of the lady who undoubtedly had been the absent Mr. Paladrini’s landlady. “Signora,” said Johnson, “we came, you understand, to celebrate a christening and regard! The effects of the opening of the champagne. Fear nothing. It will be repaired; it will be paid for. On my cousin’s behalf, I guarantee it.”

There was the slight change of air which results when many thousands of blanketlike lire float from one hand to another. “But of course!” the landlady said, while, like fading detergent, the neighbors receded behind her. “You assure me that no one was hurt? And the bambino?”

“With its little mother,” said Johnson. “You understand. A young mother’s health must not be risked. But you may congratulate the happy father. See!” And raising one implacable finger, he propelled Innes forward.

“Ah! So young!” said the landlady, and kissed him. “This is a great day, is it not? One you cannot celebrate here, in this rubbish. Since Marco is called away, why, I am your hostess. Follow.”

We did, to the flat below, which was where all the neighbors had gone to, anyway. When we got out two hours later, weaving more than a little and with our pockets squeaking with blue sugared almonds, it took us two casts around the Piazza del Popolo to find Johnson’s car, and then a miracle to drive it to Velterra.

Diana was weeping with laughter and even Innes cracked a smile now and then, which wasn’t surprising considering what I’d put in his squeezed lemon. Johnson sang all the way in between making up some obituaries which would have done Digham credit and some others which made Di begin to scream, so that we had to hammer her on the back.

And I sat in the back, with a bullwhip. And a paper bag full of string, and colored balloons, and a fish with an odd message on it.

Chapter 8

I ate in the Dome that day, lunching off some of Innes’s bread and salami with a mug of black coffee steaming among the jars of hypo while I developed the plates from my night’s work. Johnson and Di had gone straight to Maurice’s villa, where Di appeared to be staying, and Innes was in Mouse Hall, after entering the Dome briefly with me to demonstrate how to trip a Wyoming steer with my bullwhip. This he managed to do after unhooking both the flanking bay trees from their tubs outside the door and reducing a spare chair to batons; I had been more generous with my doctoring than I intended. Then he wandered off to give Poppy her bran and water and Cuddle.

It was then that I remembered the body in the meat safe and went off, not too steadily myself, to make the black coffee. If you have ever thought of working alone on an Italian hilltop with a corpse frozen hard in the meat safe, my counsel is not to.
Sadly missed along Life’s way,/But quietly remembered every day
. Then Jacko came in, carrying sensational news from point to point like a concrete mixer.

Someone had pinched our frozen friend’s film from Maurice’s amphora, and Maurice was raising the roof about it. And someone, while Maurice was raising the roof, had been raking through all our belongings. My possessions and Charles’s were scattered all over the digs, Jacko said, and his own room was a shambles. He’d just been fixing it and trying to stop our landlady from calling the police when Maurice had rung to report the film stolen.

“And I’ve just come from Innes’s digs,” said Jacko virtuously. “In case there was trouble, you know. And
his
room is a sensation as well. He’ll blow his top when he sees it.
When
he sees it. Where have you types been spending the morning? Charles came in after breakfast to find you, and then came raging back this afternoon from the Villa Borghese in a froth because none of the models had turned up and you weren’t to be found in Rome either. His face when he saw his paisley underwear all over the floor was quite something, I can tell you.
And
his precious film missing. He’s going to have to take his shots all over again tomorrow morning.”

“No, he isn’t,” I said. “Johnson and I have work for him tomorrow morning.” And I sat him under the red light in the developing room while I finished off what I was doing and told him all that had happened.

What with that and the gin and the fact that the thing that mixes the emulsion had retired for the season, the results from that batch of plates were never to my mind what you would call totally reliable, which just goes to show that you should never get your astral bodies mixed up with the two other kinds. At the end Jacko, who had interrupted all the way through, jumping up and down like another bloody locust, said, “And Innes. Do you believe him?”

I switched the light on and dried my hands. “Jacko, how do I know? I will admit, he gave me a few anxious moments. But his story rang absolutely true and he really did go sage green when the gun fired. Johnson thinks we should take him on the balloon truck expedition and just see what happens.”

“Um. Ruth?” said Jacko. I had hung up my lab coat and was switching off to go down to the office. Jacko followed me thoughtfully. He said, “We know you’re all right because you nearly got killed, and you know I’m all right because I was with you when it all happened —”

“And saved me,” I said. I stopped and issued him a kiss of merit with my fingers under his chin and then went on downstairs.

“Well,” he said, still following, talking. “But what do we know about Johnson?”

“I thought of that,” I said. I had reached the ground floor. I turned. “But everything checks. For one thing, we shouldn’t have traced the balloon man at all but for Johnson. And for another, he’s far too well known. Just try and work out how an internationally famous portrait painter could get mixed up in something as petty as this. Or would need to. He must be loaded.”

“A fair description,” said Johnson’s voice just behind me. I turned very slowly and said, “How did you get in?” and he smiled at me rather hazily and held up two keys for inspection.

“Innes has gone home to have a good sleep, and Maurice says he doesn’t intend to be the only sober person at a portrait sitting. You promised that one day you would show me over the observatory.”

I stared at those devious glasses. Then I got it. “Your room has been searched as well?” I asked.

“Right,” said Johnson. “And
after
the signed film was stolen.”

“And it occurs to you that perhaps the Dome has been turned over?”

“It seems to me,” Johnson said, “that two people are after that film. One of them has it, and the other is still trying to find it. And if the person trying to find it is the man who broke in the other night, he has a key, or access to one, remember?”

“Wait a minute,” Jacko said. He came down the last of the steps and stood frowning at Johnson. “If the film has gone from the vase, then one of us either took it or told about it.”

“That’s right,” said Johnson placidly. “The same applies to this character who’s now hunting it. He was too late in reaching the amphora… You’re quite right, you know. Even Maurice has his suspicions. You can see him, if you like, in raccoon collar and cuffs and a Stetson, limping about the grounds looking for footprints. I thought I would come and look for footprints as well.”

But although we scoured every inch of the Dome, we found no trace of disturbance which means there hadn’t been one: whatever else we are not, Jacko and I are reasonably methodical. In any case, as we realized when we thought about it, Jacko had been in the Dome all the morning, and there had been the briefest of intervals between his departure and my fuddled arrival with Innes. At the end of the search, Johnson removed himself and his glasses from the fascinations of the developing room and said, “Right. That leaves only Mouse Hall.”

I remembered the second key in his hand. I looked at Jacko and Jacko said, “Innes gave you the key to Mouse Hall?”

“Well…” said Johnson. We were eating Innes’s biscuits in the kitchen, since work makes you hungry. Jacko said accusingly, “You stole that bloody key!”

“Well,” said Johnson. “I
should
like to know what he’s got in that building. After all, I’ve practically slept with his mouse.”

Innes’s pad is five minutes away, and, even with the wisteria off it, looks more fit for Giselle than Innes. But within the pillars it was once an observatory. Its corrugated roof moves on a long ratchet which slides back at the touch of a switch. If its own generator should fail, which Heaven forbid, the roof can be rolled back with a kind of starting handle. But since Innes created his Incubator the roof has never been rolled back and there have been no power failures, for the simple reason that Innes took everything to pieces and replaced it with British Imperial Standard, to the last twist of fuse wire and screw. We in the observatory envy Innes.

We envy him for more than that. While we congeal in the Dome, Innes works day and night at a comfortable 68° Fahrenheit, because that is what the Incubator fancies. Otherwise it would rust up like a tin can from humidity.

The gush of warm air greeted us the moment Johnson unlocked the door and we tiptoed in. I don’t know why we tiptoed in, except that neither Jacko nor I had ever been in Mouse Hall on our own before. It felt like stealing more of Innes’s biscuits. I shut the door fast behind us and walked up beside Johnson Johnson, who was looking as everybody looks when they first step into an electronic workshop. That is, blasé.

This is the fault of the S.F. kiddie shows on the telly. In Innes’s workshop, two thirds of the walls, benches and floor space are covered with banks of dials filled with illuminated rows of running numbers. Disks of colored light flicker on and off all about you: rows of scarlet horseshoes shimmer and wink; machinery buzzes and drones and the air conditioning breathes at you heavily. Because electronic machinery doesn’t like being switched on and off, Mouse Hall is always furtively busy as well as cozy. The total effect is pure Disney.

I knew exactly how Johnson’s mind was working. If it looks spurious when it is real, it wouldn’t be very hard to make it look real when it is spurious. He walked to the end of the room, where Poppy poked her white nose out of her cage, her eyes sparking like garnets from the clinical orderliness of the work bench and tool-making area. A corrugated wall partition, running on tracks, could divide the room when the lathe was in action. The Incubator, along with Innes, didn’t tolerate dust.

An oscilloscope, plugged into a faulty photon developer, displayed a jagged green line, trembling, on its rectangular screen. “He has a laser?” Johnson said. He was offering Poppy a sunflower seed. She sniffed it, twitching, and then drawing it from his fingers, ran with it into her medicated nest of white shredded Cuddle, from whence the sound of cracking emerged.

“She would stay longer if it was Innes,” I said. “She isn’t very tame… We all use the laser. To test new equipment, for example. Opticals come in from Switzerland, and we keep the truest and send the others all back. It’s done by passing light through a half-silvered plate of very true glass, separating the beams and then marrying them on return.”

“Then you need a good deal of power?” Johnson said.

Everyone always mentions the power because the wires are so obvious. Every workshop is hanging with wires, and this was no exception. Hanks of colored wire descended from almost everything visible. At the Dome, our main cable runs around an open pelmet just above arm’s reach under the cupola. Innes’s travels all over the ceiling and down one wall. We work on 500 volts and make do. “Innes has two thousand volts there,” I said, “if he wants it. And it’s connected to the Incubator. That’s why we never remove the casing if Innes isn’t here. No one would like telescope-flavored crisps.”

“Ah, yes,” said Johnson, and turned to the middle of the floor at long last. “Ah, yes. So this is the Incubator.”

The Incubator was, of course, pure science fiction, bedded in concrete because of its weight, with a working surface built all around it. It was dazzling white like an igloo: another of Innes’s precautions. No damp could get through the casing of foam plastic blocks which enclosed it. They were cut as with a jigsaw, fat and warm and solid with calculations scribbled all over them, and fringes of thin colored wires festooned below.

There were sheets and sheets of calculations on the work surface also, all neatly pinned to backing boards and numbered in Innes’s writing: if Innes wasn’t engaged in advanced scientific work of an experimental nature, he was giving a very good impression of it. Johnson walked all around it and said, “Should I understand what it does, if you told me?”

“We can’t even tell you,” Jacko said. “Innes would have to do that, or some buff at the Trust, and the chances are that you wouldn’t understand, anyway. But you can take my word that he’s a fully qualified scientist in his line, just as he’s a fully qualified stuffed shirt in private life, the poor little bastard.”

“You mean,” said Johnson into a sudden silence, “he isn’t a solo vibraphone player suborned by the Chinese for luncheon vouchers. But that’s no secret; we know all about his career… The point is, what is he doing in Velterra?”

“The point is,” I said, “what are you doing in Velterra? You’ve switched off the power.”

“Christ!” said Jacko with more reverence than I have ever heard from him except in the developing room. He hurried over to where Johnson was standing in front of the switchboard. Johnson continued to stand in front of the switchboard and Jacko came to a halt. “The damage,” said Johnson mildly, “is done. Why not make the most of it?”

With the power hum absent, the silence screamed at you. All around us the lights had gone out; the needles, shocked, were oscillating to a standstill. In her cage Poppy still cracked industriously over her seed. Whatever experiment or series of experiments had been ticking on inside the shed, everything had come to a halt. I said, “That was inexcusable. That was inexcusable even for a layman. Nobody does that, ever, to another man’s work.”

I know Jacko felt exactly the same. We both stared at Johnson and met nothing at all but the blank, icy flash of his spectacles. “As Timothy would say, silly me,” Johnson said in a voice as hard as his bifocals and, walking forward, laid hands on blocks of foam plastic and proceeded methodically to remove them. Then, when it was all laid bare, he turned to me and Jacko and said curtly, “Well?”

I don’t think even I had realized the delicacy and complexity of what Innes was doing before that. But for the network of fine colored wires that hung everywhere, the inside of the Incubator might have been a fantasia of pure abstract design; a garden of convoluted plastic as fine as paper sculpture, interlaced with silvery wafers of metal and stiffened, here and there, with arcs and rods of stuff more solid. There was a red laser fitted inside it. What else there was could hardly be distinguished in the gray light from the single small window. I leaned forward, holding my breath, and a little jet of light sprang from Johnson’s hand into the central bank of the machine. He handed me the torch and I used it and then gave it to Jacko.

Jacko switched it off and looked at me. “I can’t tell,” he said. “It’s more advanced than anything I’ve ever seen before. It seems to have to do with cosmic ray tracking, but that might be only the initial stage toward something much more important. It isn’t a fake and it isn’t a toy, which leaves us all out on a limb. However well we put all this back, Innes is bound to know from his records that his power’s been switched off, and when.”

“I see,” Johnson said. He had a last look inside the Incubator himself and then, with great delicacy, began building the nest of white blocks around its contours again. “We can’t fake it?”

“We can’t fake it,” I said with finality.

“And you wouldn’t if you could,” said Johnson, stepping back and pressing down again the handle of the power board. With a whine, the air conditioning came into action and the twinkling dials, roused to life, began presenting their hurrying messages. “But as it happens, it doesn’t much matter. Since it seems Innes has nothing to hide, then it is unlikely that Innes will take issue over a checkup. Particularly as there is one matter that he hasn’t yet explained to us fully himself.”

BOOK: Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05
5.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Lawman Returns by Lynette Eason
Secret of the Wolf by Susan Krinard
Body by Audrey Carlan
Seaspun Magic by Christine Hella Cott
Fly by Wire: A Novel by Ward Larsen
Farlander by Buchanan, Col