Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 (12 page)

“Nitrogen,” Johnson said curtly. He clawed half a dozen balloons off the windshield and beat them back into the body of the truck. I tried to do the same and Charles caught my arm again and hung on to it.

I wrenched myself free. “Look. Nitrogen couldn’t blow anyone’s head off. Not at that pressure. You’re dotty.”

“In any case,” Johnson said, “I didn’t fill these balloons in Paladrini’s flat. I filled them from the developing gas in the Dome. Jacko helped me.”

There was a sharp silence. Then I said, “You couldn’t. The nozzle’s too large.”

Something banged against the off door of the truck and we stopped and started. There was a lot more yelling. “It isn’t,” Johnson said. “It was just right.
For God’s sake
, will you get rid of…”

He stopped talking. I withdrew both hands sharply from the bunch of balloons I was holding in check and let them collect where they wanted. I said, “Did the cylinder have a red and white label?”

And Johnson said, “No. It had no label at all.”

A couple of balloons drifted onto my knees and I arched back and looked at them. I remembered the dead locusts in Paladrini’s bedroom where no shot had been fired. And the gas cylinder in that same bedroom, which had had a red and white label. And, I now remembered, a smeared instruction in green felt pen.

That hadn’t been Mr. Paladrini’s own gas cylinder which he used to fill his balloons. That had been the cylinder from the Dome. And the one now in the Dome, which Johnson had used to innate these balloons for the Castel Sant’ Angelo, had been filled… was almost certainly filled with the chemical which had killed the unfortunate man from the Villa Borghese in the zoo toletta.

I said, “How many did you sell?”

“None of the blue ones. Listen,” said Johnson carefully. “I’m putting up my window. We don’t want kids to get hold of them. Ruth, take your jacket off. Charles, keep her from squashing the balloons while she does it. Now turn and lay the jacket over the rest of the stock so that nothing can prick the balloons. Right. Now Charles, take off your coat and see if you can rig it between us and the back of the truck while Ruth pats the balloons to the back.”

We did as he said. He drove with one hand through the Piazza di Venezia, parting balloons with the other and going so fast that at one point he nearly overshot the Mercedes-Benz. The chauffeur was sitting stoically negotiating the traffic jams and apparently oblivious to the drama going on behind him. The passenger in the back seat had not even turned. Occasionally you could glimpse through the back window the edge of a red balloon. The very word balloon was beginning to bring me out in a rash. I got my jacket off and Charles and I turned, overlapping like salmon in a fish ladder, and struggled to spread it over the sharp-edged display cards and ball-point pens and metallic badges.

A balloon slid down the inside of the seat and rested, bulging, between his knee and the bench back. You couldn’t even push him off it because balloons were clinging to our hips and the backs of our legs; the floor was deep in them. I grabbed Charles’s knee and eased it up with my fingers while he looked down to see what was the matter. In the blue light he looked like a rather sickly stained-glass window; I expect I looked the same. Johnson scooped away the balloons from the windshield; the traffic lights changed to green up above us and he put his foot down to get into gear.

There was a blue balloon just resting between his instep and the underside of the clutch pedal. I let Charles go and twisting around, dived for it. Johnson, pushed on by a surging comber of traffic, continued to press his foot down unnoticing. The balloon flattened, squeaked and popped sideways from under the pedal as I hit the floor, parting three more balloons and compressing another in my middle. I felt the hard resilience of it as I folded onto it like a jackknife. Then Charles, with a gasp, was holding me back by the elbow and easing out the balloon with one shaking hand. I burst into tears.

I am not proud of that journey, and I don’t suppose Charles was, either, unless there are any medals going for doing what you are told while vibrating like tuning forks. We never did get all the balloons in the back. We could only hold Charles’s coat, and it wasn’t big enough to cover all the space between us and the back of the truck. There was nothing to tie it to and nothing to tie it with, anyway. So Charles went on holding it, jerking to and fro as the truck stopped and started, while I persuaded the balloons to bob around behind it. Whatever I did, the moment Johnson stopped, which he did every forty seconds or so, the whole flock rose up and swam to the front of the cabin again. When he started again, they were apt to move backward. That is, they came drifting and clinging about me, and filled the floor space and bumped on the roof while I tried to pat them gently out of the cab, remembering to take a breath now and then. The Mercedes got to the Piazza dell’Esedra and began tooling around the fountain in a Wall of Death composed of Fiats and scooters.

Johnson said, “Ruth. It’s up to you. If I stop, we’ll be run into. If I draw in to the side, we’ll attract the police, which you may or may not think is a good idea. There’s no legitimate parking for miles. If we let the balloons loose we’ll cause a lot of deaths, mostly to children. If we go on I can’t guarantee that you won’t either be killed in a car crash or blown up by one of these anyway. So —”

The Mercedes-Benz had pulled past the railway terminal (Bagagli in Arrivo), rolled through a tunnel by the post office and passed Lazio Station to halt on the diamond cobbles at another set of traffic lights. A blue and white single-deck trolley bus loomed up; its arms waving and another chorus of hoots and Charles’s shout combined caused Johnson to break off and spend a few concentrated moments on scraping alongside and eventually sliding out of its way.

The windshield had jammed up with balloons again. I began knocking them back while dimly, through the rubber, we could see the lights changing from red to green. A string of brick viaduct arches loomed ahead, and a single-decker No. 12 trolley bus in two shades of green took an unexpected sweep toward us. The Mercedes disappeared under the arches and Johnson, veering away from the trolley bus, glanced against the side of a taxi and then accelerated after.

“— So at the first opportunity I am going to slow down and you will both jump out,” he said.

“Leaving you to crash. Powerful solution,” I said.

“Leaving me, I hope, to follow and hold a moderately gripping conversation with the bastard in front — There’s a balloon under the gear lever…” said Johnson quickly.

Charles dropped his arms and then straightened them again as half a dozen balloons lipped over his coat and floated up to the windshield. I eased forward and cleared the gear lever and then began gently to clear the cab again, my hair in my eyes. The red brick viaduct had dropped behind and the stream of traffic, with us and the Mercedes-Benz still in it, flowed forward into the Via Appia Nuova, which is two-way, with a tree-lined tramway track fenced off in the middle. I said, “If we weren’t here you couldn’t drive at all, mate. We go on or we get out together.” The windows kept steaming up. It hardly mattered because you couldn’t see through them anyway, but I wiped a space in front of Johnson and said, “I’m staying if you are. He might stop. He might stop at any moment.”

“Are you crazy?” Charles said. I could guess what his arms felt like, stretched out up there; he was speaking in a strangled kind of way over one shoulder. He said, “Do you think that bastard in front hasn’t noticed there’s a truck hanging with balloons panting after him? He’s getting out of the city because he wants a clear stretch of road. And as soon as he’s got a clear stretch of road, he’ll open up and you’ve lost him.”

We stopped and started again at some more lights. The Supermercati and tabaccherie and all the rest of the shops were closed for lunch; torn election posters flapped in the wind. The Mercedes turned left into the Via delle Cave and we followed. All Rome goes home to its wife for its midday canneloni. We were in the middle of all Rome going home to its wife. I said, gazing at the car in front and all I could see of the passenger, “I bet he doesn’t have a wife.”

“He had a wife, but lost her. The circumstances,” said Johnson, “were tragic.”

We passed a flower market and some road-mending machinery. “She got caught,” said Charles defiantly, “in a multicore cable factory. Am I to take it, then, that we’re going on after him?”

Johnson said, “I’ll stop if you want to.” Ahead, there was sky and green fields. Soon the road would be opening out.

“No,” said Charles. “But you have thought of what will happen if someone gives us the smallest knock and, for example, the window glass shatters?”

“Broken glass,” said Johnson.

“Burst balloons,” I added. My heart was going like one of the jumping dogs and I wanted to laugh and laugh. I said, “Why a multicore cable factory?” I put into place a bobbing shower of balloons and begged Charles, without words, for an obituary. He looked around at me and grinned, and I should have married him, then and there, if he had asked me.

“All right,” he said.

“
They dug her grave the other day

It stretched for twenty miles each way

She carries gas to Beachy Head

And lights up Brighton from her bed

And transmits chat from Lewes to Hove

My multicore departed Love
.”

Then Johnson said, “Hold on to your hats, children,” and put his foot down on the accelerator.

The following ten minutes I prefer not to remember. We got to the open road, or the sort of open road that lies around outside Rome. Grass, trees, filling stations, generating stations, henhouses, woodyards, villas, vineyards, tilled fields, small bars, sixteen warehouses for Venetian chandeliers and rows and rows of antico acquedottos on the horizon. The Mercedes moved very gently into the fast lane and, as Cassandra had predicted, got the hell out of it.

Johnson followed. What he did with that harmless little truck would have brought tears to Mr. Paladrini’s eyes, if Mr. Paladrini had stayed around long enough to see it. The speedometer needle began to creep upward. Peering through the balloons Johnson moved into the fast lane and put his foot down still more, but this time you couldn’t see what the speedometer needle was doing, it was vibrating so much. So were we. Our heads were nodding like pecking ducks and the balloons had stopped swaying backward and forward and stayed where they were, chattering.

They were also getting warm. The hood was steaming lightly and the noise from the engine was only bested by the noise from the exhaust when it kicked off its silencer. We vibrated on, hooting courteously and occasionally glancing lightly off the sides of accompanying traffic, but we didn’t lose the Mercedes. There were a few times when the rise of the road may have hidden her from us, and once an angry cinquecenti threatening legal action momentarily held us up because he kept banging his fist on the driver’s window as we traveled side by side and we thought he was going to drive it right through the glass. Fortunately there arrived a gap in the traffic at the right moment and Johnson drew away in a terrible cloud of burned cooking petrol, and there was the Mercedes on the horizon ahead, turning off to the left.

It was a miracle, for thirty seconds later we should have lost him. We juddered steaming along to the junction and turned off up a green country road after our quarry.

Turned off and screeched to a halt. For across that quiet country road was drawn up a blue van with CARABINIERI printed across it, and on either side of it were three or four white-helmeted policemen on motorbikes, with guns in their holsters.

We all looked at the wing mirror. On the wheel I could see Johnson’s hands, twitching to swing around and make a dash back for it.

It was no good. Behind us, a couple of police cars and two more cyclists had followed us off the main road and were now strung across, blocking our exit with complete efficiency.

Our little train of accidents had not escaped the notice of the police. We were about to be slung into jail, and after all we had endured, the man in the Mercedes was escaping. Johnson whipped off his dark glasses and said, “I’ll have to open a window. Clear it.”

We pushed the balloons behind Charles’s coat and held them. With the car still, they stayed. A man wearing a blue uniform with red stripes on his trousers had got out of a jeep and was coming toward us, swinging leather-gloved hands. He had a cased rifle slung at his right side. Johnson wound down the window as the policeman arrived and, bending down, looked at us all.

It was a long, steady look. Then he asked, politely, for our driving license, our passports and our papers. Since we didn’t have a driving license and I knew for a certainty there weren’t any papers I wondered what Johnson was handing him. Then I saw it was his visiting card, with a 100,000 lire note wrapped around it.

“A burglary has been committed on the property of Signor Maurice Frazer, with whom I am staying,” Johnson said in exemplary Italian. “We are in pursuit of a Mercedes-Benz which we have reason to believe is involved in it. Our present vehicle is borrowed. If you will be so kind as to accompany us, I hope yet to overtake the other car and bring the scoundrel to justice. Any charges being preferred against us for damage caused during our journey I shall be only too happy to meet in full presently.”

The officer didn’t take the 100,000 lire note. He didn’t take the rifle out and shoot us with it either. He said, “The black Mercedes-Benz which only this moment preceded you?”

“Yes,” said Johnson quickly. “With a man with a red balloon seated inside it.”

“Ah!” said the officer blankly. He bent a little farther and looked at me, and then at Charles and then back to Johnson again. He said, “But the Mercedes-Benz you speak of has halted. There is no difficulty about addressing the passenger. It was the passenger who asked us to stop you.”

I thought of all the teleromanzos I had seen and said hoarsely to Johnson, “They’re fakes! They’re not carabinieri. They’re going to take us all prisoner…”

The officer was smiling at me. Still smiling, he put his hand inside his jacket and producing a police identity card, held it so that we could read it. As a matter of fact, it was creeping upon me that in this day and age it was unlikely that five police motorcycles, a jeep, a truck and three cars could be rigged up out of plasticine. Then I saw the truck backing a little, to allow a glimpse of the black Mercedes-Benz standing docilely in the road just beyond it. And opening the door and strolling toward us was the man with the red balloon, without the red balloon, or a gun, or anything but a cold, satisfied smile on his face. “That’s the man,” I said quickly.

“That’s the man,” Johnson said, “who we believe broke into Signor Maurice Frazer’s property.”

“That,” said the officer, turning to face the bald-headed man, saluting and turning back to Johnson again, “is the Chief Commissioner of our police, Signor Johnson.”