Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 (8 page)

“You don’t mean — ” said Timothy. “Not Mr. Paladrini who was so nice to the weenies?”

“The same,” answered Johnson.

“Oh but do go,” said Timothy. “You have his address?”

“Sit down, Timothy,” said Maurice. “You aren’t going. I don’t see why anyone need go. Wheel the body out of your meat safe, and I shall tell the gardener to bury it. There are plenty of places in the garden.”

“And the police?” Jacko said.

“This,” said Maurice, “is nothing to do with the police. It is on my property and in my observatory.”

“But leased to the Trust,” I said quickly. “And if it all came out anyhow, think of the row. Why not take a half measure? Leave the man in the safe, and give us two more days to make some inquiries. If we can’t do it by then, Jacko will make his dramatic discovery of the body. How’s that?”

“All right,” said Jacko. Everyone nodded. Jacko added, “So who goes with Johnson this morning? All of us?”

“It’s an interesting thought,” Maurice said. “I take it you are trying to
avoid
the attention of the police?”

“Actually,” said Johnson, “I’m going alone. Don’t worry. I have on my tearproof mascara.”

There was the grinding noise of a number of people changing their minds. Then Jacko said, “Well, if you want to. I’ve got film to develop anyway. But Charles could go. You’ve forgotten, Ruth. He doesn’t need to retake all his photographs.”

“Why?” said Charles. He looked, poor darling, as if he could have done with some of our coffee.

“Because we found the film on the body,” Jacko said. “The film he took out of your camera, Charles, before he smashed it and ran out and got shot. He’d shoved it into his sock but it was rolled up and properly sealed. Ruth has it.”

An elegant howl left Charles’s lips. “Madder music,” he said, “and stronger wine: this is my birthday, love, today.” I delved in my handbag, found the roll of film and tossed it to him.

Johnson, rising between us, thoughtfully fielded it. “I’m terribly happy for you,” he said, “but let’s keep our heads. If we have to call in the police, this is evidence. You know what’s in it, Charles. You don’t have to take these pictures again. I vote we leave the roll here with Maurice. I’ll sign it” (he did so), “and put it out of sight… there.”

There was a clink as he dropped the film inside an Attic vase rampant with satyrs and maenads intent on creative play projects which ought to have cost Maurice half the proceeds from his last West End run but probably didn’t. It seemed the right spot for Diana, if only in the negative, and Charles was perfectly complaisant. He turned in the doorway as we were leaving and, sinking his chin on his chest, delivered himself, I remember, of one of the gems of his collection:

“
Sweet Mem’ry’s Chord

Was Touched Today

They Came and Took

Your Teeth Away

Your Wig has Gone

Your Gas Limb Too

The Plastic Joints

That Rivet You

Your Contact Lenses They Removed

And All About You that We Looved.
”

I went back and had breakfast with him, and then left him to go and finish my work in the Dome.

But I didn’t go to the Dome. I waited at the gates of the villa and made Johnson take me to Rome to see Mr. Paladrini.

I slept most of the way into Rome, curled up on the passenger seat beside Johnson. He drove fast and steadily and when I finally awoke we were through the Porta San Lorenzo and into our first bout of traffic jams. There was a rug over me which hadn’t been there before, and my cheeks were wet.

I dried them, and Johnson said, “He’s in the Via Margutta, behind the Via del Babuino. But I think we deserve a drink at Renati’s first.” He had made no fuss, to my surprise and relief, about taking me with him. He had not, come to think of it, even appeared amazed to see me. He was, of course, one of your homespun types, invincibly phlegmatic. Like me.

It had begun to rain when we got to Renati’s. Johnson parked the car, presumably on somebody’s doormat, and joined me at a pink table. I had a gin fizz, and said, “I thought we were in a hurry. I thought you were going to rush to the Via Margutta, fling open the door and say, ‘Ha!’ ”

“You can’t say, ‘Ha!’ in Italian,” Johnson pointed out patiently. “You say, ‘Ah!’ Or perhaps, ‘Ciao!’ ”

“Then he shoots you,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be painting somebody? It’s less dangerous, and presumably you get paid for it.”

“In other words,” said Johnson, “don’t go to the Via Margutta?”

There was a pause. “No,” I said.

“I see. Then what,” said Johnson, “are you suggesting instead? A high-stake rubber of contract?” He stared at me, the black eyebrows raised above the obscuring bifocals, and then when I opened my mouth, forestalled me smoothly. “No. Stinging rebuke followed by abject contrition. But if I don’t do this now, the police will merely do it in two days’ time, Ruth. All I shall do is threaten him with the polizia. This is only Red Riding Hood. What I should like is a look at the wolf.”

“And if the wolf is one of us?” I said.

He took his glasses off. There was nothing wrong with his eyes underneath, except that they were chilly and narrowed. He said, “It probably is. Are you suggesting that he — or she — should be allowed to escape?”

I saw I had made a mistake. An irretrievable, hopeless mistake. “I thought that was why you were doing this,” I said. “I thought you were the only one who realized it had to be one of us. Someone from the villa. Or someone from the observatory. I thought you would help us to —”

“Sweep it under the carpet?” said Johnson. “Or bury it all in the garden? It’ll be the making of Maurice’s organic tomatoes.”

At the next table a middle-aged lady with long, shining fingernails poured a little cream delicately into her saucer and held it under her bosom. A miniature white poodle attired in a black knitted tube like a sock emerged from the overhang and began to lap with a scrap of pink tongue. She conversed with it, in miniature Italian.

I looked back at Johnson. He had put on his glasses and all I could see was beer and bifocals again. I said, “I suppose not.”

“I suppose not, too,” Johnson said. “Tolerance, yes. Decadence, no. People don’t laugh at comic obituary verse because death is funny. Quite the reverse. On the other hand, you can stretch your sense of proportion on light years until it can’t apply itself to the human dilemma anymore. Hence the mystics.” He finished his beer and continued in the same tone of voice, “So you really think Charles wants to murder you?”

The saucer at the next table tilted and shot a trail of cream upward; the poodle, craning forward, lapped it up neatly. All the blood in my veins rose as through a hose pipe into my face but I didn’t look away and I didn’t gasp and I didn’t lose my head. I said, “All right, my adrenalin blipped. The rest of the experiment was a failure. I don’t think Charles is trying to murder me. I don’t think Charles has any more to do with all this than I have. I live with him, remember?”

“When he isn’t in Naples. He
was
in Naples, Ruth. The message on the fish couldn’t have been for him. He wasn’t at the Fall Fair and, alone of you all, he didn’t have one of the new keys to the Dome and he didn’t have any possible access to one. He couldn’t possibly have murdered the man in the zoo: he hadn’t even reached the loo when you heard the shot that killed him. And lastly, if he didn’t want you around, he would hardly have come back to you after Naples.”

Johnson grinned at me and turning to the woman at the next table said, “We’re rehearsing a play.” She smiled tremulously and then, ducking her head, began to collect her gloves, her handbag and the dog like a native of Vesuvius reacting to the first smoke ring over the crater. Johnson turned back to me and I said, “I know all that.”

“Then why were you crying?” said Johnson mildly.

The woman at the next table had gone. I said, “I was asleep. My God, I’m not responsible to anyone for my dreams, am I?”

“And yesterday?” the irritating voice went on persistently.

It was unfair. It was unfair to me and to Charles, and it was nothing to do with Johnson. And, more damnable than anything else, I could feel my eyes beginning to sting once again. Johnson said, “I know. You love the man. But you
have
been worried. I wonder if perhaps Charles seemed to have more money than you ever expected? And if perhaps I’m right in thinking that your camera and his have quite clear distinguishing marks?”

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have to do anything. My face gave me away.

“I see they did,” Johnson said. “So you expected Charles to remark on it at the zoo, and when he didn’t, you jumped to conclusions. But, you know, he might have had a very good reason for letting people think that it was his film which had been stolen, and not yours. He might have realized that his own camera must be lying about unprotected, with even more important couture pictures still in it. Or he may have remembered that he left a film in his camera which he didn’t much want anyone to see anyway for quite uncriminal reasons. People who are good with cameras shoot funny things with them sometimes.”

“You guessed,” I said.

“I guessed,” said Johnson. “What was on Charles’s film? Girlie pictures?”

“You could call it that,” I said. Maurice had asked me if I was a prude and he was right, I was. I was a heel, too. I had sent Jacko to Maurice’s party on Saturday night after the zoo, and I had carried Charles’s camera down from the dome where he had left it and developed the pictures inside it. It had only been half full, like mine. I said, “Some of the pictures were couture ones, the important ones which the Villa Borghese men must have been after.. The rest were just straight sexy portraits like Jacko’s.”

Johnson said, “What did you do with the negative?”

“It’s well hidden,” I said, and produced a grin. “I shouldn’t like any modest souls to be outraged. I put a new film in the camera and clicked through the first half in darkness.”

“So the film our frozen friend pinched later on the same evening was a blank one? What an unsatisfactory thing,” said Johnson, “to be shot for. But at least you can acquit Charles, surely, of committing murder and mayhem to preserve a little smut and a change in the hemline.
Now
what is eating you?”

“Charles will be so worried,” I said. “He’ll find he’s lost all his fashion pictures.”

“He can reshoot them,” Johnson said. “And they haven’t got into the wrong hands. Surely that is what matters. He’ll put it down to a fault in the camera, and since the camera is in five hundred pieces, no one is likely to dispute it… How nice,” he said, breaking off and then recovering smoothly. “If you breathe in when you do it again, you won’t fog my glasses.”

“Hul
lo
,” said Diana Minicucci above us. She bent again and kissed Johnson, thoughtfully.

It was, I had forgotten, one of Di’s other haunts. She had been done over at Giulio’s again and was wearing a long, thin olive suede coat and huge tinted glasses with yellow rims and her own hair, coiled over her cheeks and knotted in ladylike fashion in the nape of her neck.

Johnson surveyed her in exactly the way that he had looked at Innes’s mouse which she adored and which was a change, admittedly, from poor Jacko, who treated birds and ring-pull cans as one problem. Johnson said, “We’re running away to get married. Where’s your photographer friend?”

“Looking for Ruth,” said Di, eyeing him. “When he called on her at the Dome, she wasn’t there. Panic. All sittings postponed till further notice.”

I said, “Where is Charles now?” Johnson had paid the bill and we were all standing politely being buffeted and/or pinched without even noticing it.

“Dashing around Rome like a rotary lawn mower,” said Diana callously. “If I meet him, I’ll tell him you’re having a total immersion oil-painting course. If you want him, you’ll find us all at the Villa Borghese at two. Back to the prologue.”

She didn’t interfere, because Di doesn’t interfere. But her lashes indicated that she was standing by on the secondary runway for the moment I chose to take off. Johnson said with complete unexpectedness, “We’re going to call on the man who sold Ruth a balloon outside the zoo, the day the man stole her camera and got killed. How much are you insured for?”

Diana smiled. “May I come? Really?” she said.

“We’re not getting married till after lunch,” I said. I wasn’t at all sure if Johnson knew what he was doing. “What about the Villa Borghese?”

Outside in the Piazza the rain was coming down as if a tank had burst, drowning the noise of the fountains and beating hell out of the glories of Rameses II and Merneptah (c. 13-12 B.C.) as celebrated on the ancient obelisk in the center. There was a crash of thunder, a flash, and the lights went out everywhere, busily.

Di Minicucci spread her gloveless hands. “Celestial endorsement. Not even Charles can take pictures without any power. Do we take your car or mine?”

We took neither: if a Roman junction during one of the four normal rush hours is suicide, a Roman junction while the traffic lights are off resembles nothing so much as a herd of myopic rhinoceroses meeting eye to eye with a herd of dim-witted elephants and attempting to copulate. We crossed the Piazza to the astonishment of the sheltering natives and entered the Via del Babuino without melting. Johnson’s hair dripped gently inside the shapeless tweed collar of his jacket and my trouser suit stuck to my body. Diana remained totally immaculate. I congratulated her on her appearance.

“But darling,” she said. “Absolutely new and too easy. The closest any woman can come to the tingled air-washed look of a country-freshened face. So it says on the pot. You must try it.”

The Via del Babuino is where most of the art dealers dwell and the streets around about it are occupied by the artistic colony and the voluntary bodies who serve it. The Via Babuino closes from lunchtime till half-past three in the afternoon. It was nearly lunchtime now. Between the brass rings of the eight-paneled portals the cinquecentis were filing out from their patios, leaving patches of oil by the statues. Peering through lightless windows you caught glimpses of classical busts, painted bureaus, furniture French and Italian, Dutch paintings on easels, Florentine prints on boxes and bookends. On the left, a familiar red and white street sign said CARNABY STREET, while below, a white arrow on red said VIA MARGUTTA.

“Think nothing of it,” said Johnson, and, leading briskly, turned into the street of the balloon man.

The Via Margutta is a quiet street. On the left, behind the parked cars, stretched a row of shops selling dresses and icons and paintings. On the right there was a line of mews buildings, whose faded wood doors were closed with cumbrous latches.

On none of them was the street number Johnson had been given. “I’ll ask,” I said quickly, and went into the first shop that seemed open.

It was a small leather boutique dangling with belts and shoppers and shoulder bags, with racks of suede skirts and rawhide jerkins with fringes. A male Italian with liquid eyes and a long, unwavering nose and a perfect jawline with silky black sideburns was lolling on a wooden chair absorbing instant football from a transistor, while beside him a signora in knee boots was jabbing holes in a belt with a hand-punch. Bags of eyelets and staplers and wooden shoe molds and lengths of cut leather littered the floorboards. The smell was ecstatic.

I explained I was looking for a street trader who sold Occhiali Giocattoli.

Against football, no woman can expect to compete for attention. The perfect head swiveled around in my direction. The man’s cigarette hung from his lips, and his thumbs were tucked into a belt so low it was practically garters. But his lips did not move, neither did his mind swerve from its primary task. The girl said, “For Marco, another visitor.”

Which was sad. I said, “Oh. He has someone with him?”

“Ah, frequently,” the girl said, and I didn’t need my crash course at the language laboratory to follow the nuances. “Four people to drink with last night, and already another this morning.”

“Drink, then, is his trouble?” I said. I smiled at the gladiator by the transistor, who fluttered his eyelashes.

“Why not?” said the girl, forcing an awl through a wadding of pigskin, her arm muscles rippling. “You cannot imagine he chooses to earn his living making Occhiali Giocattoli, now can you? He is an educated man, well brought up by his family.”

“You know him well, then?” I inquired.

“He is a neighbor,” the boy friend intervened lazily. “No, we do not know him well. He has accepted a coffee when he comes for his cart.”

“Where does he keep it?” I asked.

The girl jerked her head at one of the faded doors opposite. “In the mews there. His studio is two stairs along, next the dress shop. On the first floor. You will see the name, Marco Susini… To-to!”

To-to turned, with nattering reluctance, from studying all he could see of my kneecaps.

“
Cavallette
!” the girl shouted suddenly, and flung up her fist with the awl in it.

The awl was pointing at me. And the sharpened steel flashed in the candlelight.

The boy friend sprang to his feet and, snatching a broom, plunged toward me.

I flung myself sideways. There was a crash, a flurry of scattering handbags and a grunt from To-to, engaged in tolerating stress poorly among the cape leather slough-offs. Through the plate glass window I could see Johnson and Di standing outside in the rain, their hands in their pockets. I screamed, and snatched up a bullwhip of plaited kangaroo leather. To-to got to his feet scowling faintly.