Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 (6 page)

“
A million times I’ve needed you, Mum
,

A million times I’ve cried

If love could have saved you, Mum,

You never would have died
.”

“Hell,” he said abruptly. “He’s gone through the shoe shop.”

We had missed it first time around. But on the right, near the entrance, an archway led down some steps and into a lit arcade which proved to be just that: the shoe shop at the foot of the Corso. We plunged through it and into the street. Dodging up it was Mr. Paladrini, in the middle of all Rome going home to its wife and bambinos in suede jackets and knitted jackets and shortie overcoats and very long overcoats and enough polo necks to outfit the entire British Raj, and better filled, at that. We belted after.

They used to hold horseraces in the Corso, which runs for a mile uphill between the Venezia and Renati’s, and the horses must have needed corks on their shoulders, because the pavements are about three inches wide and the road not much better. It is lined with continuous blocks of shops and churches and palaces, broken by monumental squares. The palaces are the kind made of faceted marble where the barred windows start three feet above the top of your head and the gardens are full of palm trees and gardeners and the private art collections are uninsurable. We charged up it and came to a halt finally in the open space of the Piazza Colonna, with the Marcus Aurelius column towering fervently above us. “Hell,” said Johnson. “He’s gone across to the Galleria.”

The Galleria is a maze, and any self-respecting criminal would make straight for it. We had got halfway across the road with a screeching of brakes to encourage us when Johnson swung me abruptly around and raced back the way we had come. “No, he hasn’t,” he said, and at that moment I saw Mr. Paladrini, walking slowly and deceptively up past the monument and over the piazza.

Halfway across, he glanced around and saw us and, spinning around, started off, fast, in another direction. Two Fiats, an Alfa Romeo and a Mercedes-Benz allowed him to pass and met, uncontrollably, in his absence. There was a bang, followed by a quartet of long, tinny rattles. Mr. Paladrini, in a burst of imperishable speed, nipped onto the pavement and vanished down a flight of steps signposted SOTTO PASSAGGIO PEDONALE, followed by an erratic file of afflicted motorists, a number of bystanders, two carabinieri, and us.

The Piazza Colonna has been referred to as the bellybutton of Rome, and the only way to get from one side to another is under it. Once you get down the steps the foot passage is wide and crowded and brightly lit, and lined with shop display windows and showcases. It also has as many exits and entrances as a badger sett. We had hardly fought our way in when a flight of steps reared on our left labeled, P. COLONNA: MONTECITORIO. From the fact that a red-faced man with a bleeding nose was pounding madly down it, we deduced we were still in the ranks of the pursuers. We ran hopefully on.

Steps to the right: Galleria Colonna, blocked by one of the carabinieri attempting to form a one-man cordon. More steps to the right: the Palazzo della Rinascente, full of people running both up and down and colliding with one another. Further steps to the right: the Piazza Silvestro, with six people standing on the stairs waving their arms around and arguing. The stairs up, at which was standing the other carabiniere, listening to two drivers and a waiter shouting at one another. Johnson and I came to a halt.

“What a pity,” said Johnson. “I rather hoped they would catch him for us.”

I said, “We’ve lost him, then?”

“Not at all,” said my friend Johnson. “You underrate the speed and resourcefulness of any Roman citizen who thinks he has suffered an injury. If no one is running up those steps yelling blue murder, it is because Mr. Paladrini hasn’t run up those steps either. In which case he’s still here.”

“In the shop?” I said, LA RINASCENTE, said the shop sign beside us. Behind double glass doors we could see a busy lit interior full of men’s clothes and executive briefcases.

“Right,” said Johnson mildly. But he didn’t leap into the shop. He stood aside and, raising his voice, called in excellent Italian to the carabiniere at the end, “Here! Your man went in here! I saw him just now in the shop here!” Then he stood back, holding my arm, while every man in the passage poured past us and in through the doorway.

I looked at Johnson as the shop door swung to, and a ruminative quiet returned to the passage. “You didn’t see him,” I said.

“No,” said Johnson. “But I know where he is.” And walking six paces back he came to a halt by the Rinascente staircase, now empty. At the bottom of it was an erection like a small telephone booth, with a sign above which said FOTO-TESSERA AUTOMATICO, and a curtain closing the doorway. The curtain trembled, and Johnson addressed it.

“Mr. Paladrini,” he said. “They’re going to come back. And then I’m afraid you’re in trouble. Why not come with me? Miss Russell and I just want to talk to you.”

Silence. The curtain stopped moving.

“Mr. Paladrini,” I said. “We think someone asked you to pass on a message about the Fall Fair, and it got to the wrong person. We know about the theft of the fashion pictures, and we don’t want any publicity. If you’ll come and tell us about it, no one will do a thing to harm you.”

I tried to say the right things. I was thinking so hard that I didn’t notice that Johnson’s hand had slipped between the curtain and the edge of the cubicle. There was a chink of metal and then from inside the box a volley of brilliant white flashes, followed by a terrified cry. The curtain was wrenched back and the exponent of fairy tales tumbled out, just as the sky above the Rinascente steps was darkened by a column of people pouring down them.

I had forgotten that the main door of the department store debouches on to the street up above. The pursuit had raced through the shop and, finding nothing, had simply descended into the passage again. I heard Johnson swear feelingly just before we were bowled over and Mr. Paladrini, setting off like the hammers, tore along the rest of the passage with the four drivers and two carabinieri and the audience in full cry after him.

I gave, sitting there, a passing thought to the four impacted cars, still presumably blocking the streetway above us, but justice is justice after all, and a clearway at the rush hour isn’t everything. We walked slowly after and stood at the top of the Corso steps watching. After twenty yards the shouting increased and then died away; so did the action. They had lost him.

We walked down the steps and back again, slowly, in the direction of the Piazza Colonna. The underground passage was empty.

“Heigho,” said Johnson, and halted at the foot of the Rinascente steps. The automatic booth stood just as Mr. Paladrini had vacated it, with the curtain half torn off its rings. From the side protruded, limply, a long strip of glistening paper.

Johnson extended a hand and removed it. “Mr. Paladrini,” he said, and passed the whole strip over to me.

It held six pictures of Mr. Paladrini, working from the top of his head to his ear tip. The middle two showed the whole of his face very nicely. It was plain that, beyond any conceivable doubt, the seller of balloons and the teller of fairy tales was the same man.

“As a tonal composition,” Johnson said, “it lacks confidence. But as a clue they don’t come any better. All you and I have to do now is find him.”

At that point, I revolted. “Oh no, we don’t,” I remember announcing.

“‘The Struggling for Knowledge hath a Pleasure in it like that of Wrestling with a Fine Woman,’ ” said Johnson. “The late Marquess of Halifax. You can retire if you want to. The police are bound to have street traders’ records. I’m going to find out who Mr. Paladrini is.”

“If you do, they’ll arrest him for jaywalking,” I said. We were on the surface again and making, it seemed, for the Hassler.

“Not if I don’t tell them why I want him,” Johnson said. He remained unmoved by the idea that he would outrage the Trust, involve the Dome personnel in a court case and probably have us all extradited if he pursued his silly detective work. He fed me at the Hassler, and then mentioned that he had work to do at the villa, but would spare the time to drive me back to my digs in the Fiat. How Di ever got the idea he was a sexpot I cannot conceive.

In my pocket were two tickets, bought before his desertion by Charles for a performance by Il Gruppo Teatro Libero. The theater they were appearing in is called Il Kilt, which was enough to account for Charles’s interest. As I have indicated, he has an overdeveloped sense of the ludicrous.

Charles, I understood, was in Naples. Di, if I was not mistaken, would be at the Number One with one or more of the boys from the Fall Fair. Timothy had last been seen bending tenderly over the ketchup-covered form of Innes Wye and was possibly even now conveying him back to his bedroom, or even possibly Timothy’s bedroom in Sansavino. Jacko’s whereabouts I knew precisely. He was at the Dome, on duty until I took over at midnight.

There seemed to be no one to take me to Il Kilt but Johnson, who said he had seen
Il Barone Rampante
and why not hire a bedroom instead and play contract.

I said, “Bridge? Why bridge, for God’s sake? It needs four bods.”

“So Di has noticed,” said Johnson. “Her erotic reputation rests solely on her habit of inviting three chaps to her bedroom and all stripping off for a rubber. I know. She asked me in once, but the lights failed.”

“What a waste,” I said, playing for safety. It seemed unlikely that he was reading my mind, but I made a determined effort to clean up my thinking. I said, “Do you follow the form in the newspapers?”

“That’s why I took up the game,” explained Johnson. Someone had brought the old Fiat to the front of the Hassler and he held the door for me. “I think Di is going through life hoping to meet those chaps North, South, East and West. You know.
East felt an itch to overruff Dummy
? I’ll take you to Il Kilt if the Pope isn’t there. You can go about too much together.”

In fact, he never did take me to the Kilt, because as we drew up at the front door a man came through the crowd and stood a little way off, on the pavement, just looking.

It was Charles, with the Maserati covered with dust parked beside him.

“Goodbye, Ruth,” said Johnson. “How was Naples, Charles?”

“Neapolitan,” said Charles. He was still looking at me. I got out, and Charles shut the door of the Fiat and added, “I saw your yacht there. Much admired by the neighborhood. Your man sends his regards and says the dynamo’s fixed and she’s ready.”

He didn’t need to prove that he’d gone where he said he had. I didn’t mind whether he had been to Naples or a European Grand Masters’ Tournament with Omar Sharif, so long as he had decided, of his own accord, to come back. I said to Johnson, “I’m sorry. You’ve been so kind. You wouldn’t like two tickets for
II Barone Rampante
?”

Charles was already standing at the door of the Maserati. Johnson smiled and shook his head and drove off in a roar of high octane fuel while Charles got hold of me in full view of the clientele of the Rampant Baron and kissed me.

I relieved Jacko at midnight, which may or may not surprise you. Charles refused to come to the Dome on the grounds that he would only distract me, which was certainly true. I left him in bed, received on my way out the felicitations of our landlady and had to hammer on the door of the Dome when I got there, because the locksmiths had replaced the burst lock and Jacko had forgotten to hand out the new keys. All Jacko carries in his head are thousands of coordinates and the correct meter readings for three-dimensional natural objects, preferably moving.

He is, however, a hard-working and reliable duty man. He had been observing since seven o’clock although the weather impinged on the hazy. A cloudy sky up till midnight means, in our own code, that you can turn it in after that if you want to. I wished that night that he hadn’t been so hard-working.

He had made me coffee, and we had it in the Dome while I checked over what he had finished. I would develop his plates with mine in the morning, and by the end of the week we could pack them up and send them on to the Trust. It was the last pack we should send there this season. The week of the full moon started on Saturday, and that meant no photography. And by the end of the next week we’d have reached the end of our contract. I began to hum under my breath as I perched myself up on the ladder and Jacko, about to open the door to the stairs, said, “Don’t tell me. I’m clairvoyant. Charles is back?”

I said, stricken, “Oh Christ. Jacko, I’m terribly sorry. We’ve got the bed again. I meant to put it back in your room as I left.”

“The way I feel,” said Jacko, “it doesn’t matter. Timothy tells me you all had a gas at the Barberini. He dropped Innes off at his digs, loaded up to the eyeballs with aftershave.”

I revised my opinion of Timothy’s kindheartedness and tried to think of a way of not telling Jacko what he was asking. The trouble with Jacko is that he really does go for Di. I said, “You’ll never guess who we saw in the Barberini. The man who sold Charles and me the balloon outside the zoo. We ran after him and lost him somewhere in the Corso.”

“At the Fall Fair?” said Jacko, arrested. “You’re dreaming. The Yanks wouldn’t let a street trader in — not if he went through a car wash and wax spray with Dettol. Ruth, precious, you’ve seen too many teleromanzos on the goggle box.”

I said, “He was specially scoured for the occasion. Johnson’s got a photograph. I couldn’t stop him. There is shortly going to be a sonic boom at the Trust which could be felt in three continents, and I only hope I’m not there to hear it. In the meantime, that unfortunate star is going to set in forty minutes.”

“I’m off,” Jacko said. The cool air flowed in from the cupola. Warm from bed, I felt it on my face, but not at all through my thick jersey and anorak. In the dim light Jacko’s face looked like a clown’s, with the sad eyes and tangled hair and Zapata mustache. I said, “I’m going back after five to have breakfast. You can bunk downstairs here, if you want to.”

“Thanks,” said Jacko morosely.

“Without service and back-up facilities,” I called after him, and heard him make a rude noise as I shut the door and swung up the bench and prepared the filter and plate for their holder. I heard his footsteps ring down the spiral stair, and then clack on the marble one lower. An inner door shut. He was going to stay.

It had happened before. We didn’t bother each other. Work was work, and like Charles he occupied himself as a rule in the developing room, or reading, or listening to the British Forces Network or the Voice of America and making endless cups of coffee before turning in. I would be brought a mug and a sandwich, or perhaps join him in one halfway between exposures. But most times the place would be dark if I went downstairs, and Charles, or Jacko, asleep. Innes, who had been known to work all night on his Incubator, never came into the Dome in the evening.

But tonight Charles was asleep in my digs and Innes, it seemed, tucked up in his, stoned to the eyeballs. For slights received, Timothy had taken vengeance.

The telescope reared black above me, its cold metal bulk like a cannon, with the finder and guider tubes ranged alongside like gun barrels. The stepladder glinted in the starlight, and behind it stood the skeleton of the quarter-ton crane. Once a year, through the trapdoor below me, the mirror would descend for its aluminum coating. Mirrors are heavy, to avoid warping. I have known them to weigh almost a ton.

I switched on the power for the rings and the green slot light which showed the declination numbers and pointer. The 50-Inch was an old one, with Roman numbers. I like Roman numbers. I set and clamped it.

The right advancement is more difficult: you have to subtract the number twice from the sidereal clock before setting. I did it, and fine-set it and then undamped the main movement and pressed the switch which starts the telescope moving.

However quick you are, you must always be accurate. The filter must be put in right side up, with the surface mat and not shiny. You must remember to uncap all three of your telescopes. You must remember to take the time as you slide in the plate-holder, and to open the shutter at the end of the 50-Inch. Then you must watch, all through the exposure, that the telescope follows the arc of its subject, with the slow-motion button held in your hand.

You learn as a student how to relax, how to look steadily with one eye and not to screw up and weary the other. At first, you are allowed to cover the idle eye with your hand. Then the knack comes to you and you can stare with one eye into the lens of a telescope while the other looks into darkness, seeing nothing. I have known Charles to move soundlessly across the dome and touch me before I have been aware of him. It is, in a sense, a form of professional oblivion. It is less welcome when there are pleasanter things to do and to think of. And if you are in neither a state of depression nor a state of euphoria, it is the best source going of simple perspective.

Footsteps came up the marble stair and the loo fizzed, and the same footsteps went down again. The rest room door shut. I settled down to my constellation.

Normally, as I have said, there are no lights in an observatory after dusk. The outside door is locked, and once the door into the dome has been closed and the bench raised inside, no one can interrupt the observer. For good reason, since the incident of the wrecked camera, Jacko had had locks put on the bathroom window and any others big enough to admit an intruder. There was no reason why anyone should come near me that night except Jacko with coffee; and Jacko always took good care to clatter up the stairs and yell first, to find when the next plate would finish.

But Jacko was in bed. I gave myself a five-minute break at the end of the first two-hour session, and, taking my torch, opened the door and walked down to the ground floor through the most profound darkness and silence. The rest room door was firmly closed and a certain rhythmical obbligato which came through it indicated that Jacko had been treating his problems to Carlsbergs. I snitched a biscuit and a tumbler of Innes’s quellingly microbe-free milk and climbed back upstairs to the dome, leaving the top staircase door madly open.

That was how I first heard the footsteps so clearly.

I was in trouble just then with the cross wire. As a star begins to decline it sinks toward the thickest part of the atmosphere. Mine was dancing about in the haze. I heard the steps as I centered it with the slow-motions. I finished what I was doing and then, swearing, plunged over to shut the door before Jacko’s torchlight could hit my exposure and wreck it.

I had my hand on the door when I realized the steps weren’t Jacko’s. To begin with, there wasn’t a light showing anywhere; the whole hollow building was in darkness. Then, as I moved, the footsteps had broken off suddenly.

The dome floor is noisy to walk over. The sound of my movements would have caused Jacko to come up and call to me. But, on hearing them this person had halted.

I told myself I was hallucinating. The front door of the Dome was fast locked, and so were the windows. Jacko and I were quite alone. I was hallucinating, or else it was merely Jacko suffering the results of an excess of birras and unwilling to attract my attention.

I looked at the black bulk of the 50-Inch, breasting unaided the vagaries of the Roman atmosphere, and with an unvoiced apology to the Trust I took two silent steps out of the door and then closed it firmly behind me. I couldn’t fake an equally firm tramp across the dome floor to the telescope, but if anyone was there, I hoped he’d imagine it. I breathed as slowly and lightly as my heartbeats would let me, and waited.

Nothing happened. Behind the door, the 50-Inch motor buzzed. The central heating creaked, and a tap dripped below in the developing room. One of the electric clocks gave a whirr and a grunt and fell silent. I bent down and, sliding off first one shoe then the other, I took three steps down the metal staircase and peered over.

This time, I could see the front door. And the front door was slightly open. I could see moonlight, in a crack, down the stand-post.

So what?

Yell for Jacko. It may be Jacko I have heard, opening the door and stepping out of the Dome to look at something.

Unlikely. Even Jacko wouldn’t forget to shut the door and leave me protected. Besides, he has the key.

Yell for Jacko. He may have heard a knock on the door and let someone in, forgetting to close it.

But he wouldn’t have forgotten. See above. And then why the stealth?

Yell for Jacko. Someone else may have got in, unknown to either of us, and is lurking now in the bathroom, the developing room, the stockroom, the offices, the kitchen.

The staircase was clear. I drew a deep breath and raced down the stairs to the ground floor, giving the front door a slam as I passed it. I burst into the rest room, yelling for Jacko.

He lay on the bottom bunk, snoring, and the room stank of beer. I banged him hard on the funny bone with my torch and when he made a loud and incoherent protest I said, “There’s someone in the dome. There’s your torch. Come on.”

The kitchen was next door. I left him sitting ejaculating and ran there, switching on my torch and flinging open the door with some bravado. There was no one there that I could see, and the cutlery drawer was two paces away. I jerked it open, snatched a couple of knives and raced back to Jacko, who was upright, saying “What?” with his torch on. I put a knife in his other hand, grabbed his wrist and dragged him into the hallway. “Not again!” Jacko said.