Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (9 page)

The man disappeared around the corner of the vast car lot. I followed. For a moment I lost sight of him; then I glimpsed him far ahead, struggling through the dark mass of cars.

I had started to follow when something heavy struck me a violent blow on the base of my skull. I became quite insensible.

MY FIRST REACTION, on waking sometime later in Johnson’s grip, was to say, “Where is the patient?”

My second was to realize that I was lying there in the dog track parking lot, clad in nothing at all but my underwear. A pain radiated from the base of the cranium through my entire nervous system. I felt weak and surprisingly poorly.

“The patient is you,” said Johnson. “The whole thing was a trick to get you out here. It took us hours to locate you. Beltanno, we’re going to lift you into the back of the car and take you up to the Jackson. I don’t think anything disturbing has happened, but I’d like them to check.”

“What do you mean, disturbing?” I said. My voice was hoarse.

“I mean disturbing above the neck, B. Douglas MacRannoch,” said Johnson’s deep voice with amusement. “My God, with all that underwear, the man would need pliers.”

It was, I felt, a remark in bad taste. I was still brooding over it when Johnson, with a number of- helpers, carried me into the back of his car. The Begum’s face, distinctly anxious, was visible in the background, and Lady Edgecombe’s, bearing an appearance of anxiety which seemed to cover something quite different.

If I hadn’t thought it unlikely, even for Lady Edgecombe, I would have believed her amused.

Then I caught sight of myself in the car mirror, and all was explained. She
was
amused. She was having trouble in fact not to scream out with laughter. For I had not only been divested of clothing by my attacker: my hair had been cut off in irregular bristles all over my scalp.

Vanity is not one of my sins. But I prefer, like the next person, to be brushed, well washed, and tidy. The near-bald rag doll I saw in that mirror was the sharpest blow I suppose I had ever suffered to a pride I knew very well how to protect. My face grew hot, and I dug the nails of both hands into my palms. It is possible to control every normal physical manifestation, given enough will power. Coughs, sneezes, hiccoughs. And tears.

Johnson said, “Do you mind?” and in one smooth movement passed over a bill and slid the bandanna from the neck of one of his helpers. He bound it loosely, kerchief-style around my head and said: “You’ve got a bad cut, Beltanno, but there’s nothing science and art together won’t cure… Thelma, I think you and Lady Edgecombe should go back to the Columbus. I’ll ring you when they’ve had a look at Doctor MacRannoch. And no United Commonwealth for you tomorrow, my girl,” to me.

But he was wrong. I shared the services of the Jackson Memorial Hospital that night with Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe, and had four stitches in the back of my head, with no serious concussive complications. By morning I was able to discuss my return to Nassau with Johnson, and also, unimpeded by all but a headache, the reasons behind the attack.

“I don’t know,” he said. I must have looked an odd sight, in a hospital bedgown, with a white bandage encircling a black near-bald scalp, but he paid no attention. “The
don’t do it again
brigade, one would think. But why? Do they think you’re going to follow Edgecombe to Great Harbour Cay?”

“Lady Edgecombe invited me,” I said.

“All the same, it seems to lay a great deal of stress on your undoubtedly efficient role as guardian angel. Or are they worried not because you might save him from another attack, but because you might spot something a layman might miss? You’ll note that in everything they do they are very careful not to come into the open. No overt murder attempts have ever been made. Everything has been carefully designed to look like an accident.”

“I couldn’t go to Great Harbour Cay,” I said stiffly. “I understand you think I might be of some use, but I really cannot risk leaving my post any longer. I do depend on it, as you know, for my living.”

“Oh,” said Johnson, but not at all with the inflection I expected. The bifocal glasses flashed, and he got up and began in a leisurely manner patting the pockets of his now severely creased suit. “That reminds me. Do you remember Pally Loo-loo?”

I stared at him with a great deal of misgiving.

“You don’t remember,” said Johnson.

“No, I don’t,” I said sharply. “And by the way, who was it who kept putting vodka into my —”

Johnson stopped, with his hand on his pocketbook. “That’s another mysterious thing,” he said. “I assumed it was the Begum, but she says it wasn’t. And Beltanno, how do you know it was vodka?”

I stared at him. “I don’t, for sure,” I said at length. “But it’s the only tasteless strong drink I could think of. Wasn’t it?”

“It may well have been,” Johnson said. “I just wondered. Because, you know, tomato juice with sauce in it can disguise almost anything. But let’s get back to Pally Loo-loo.”

“What is Pally Loo-loo?” I said. I was becoming annoyed.

“She’s a bitch,” Johnson said. “Owner: Marty Stootzer. Kennel: Marty Stootzer. Trainer: Willy Emmet. Whelped: June 1964, Pally-itzy out of Pot Pot. Post weight: sixty-five pounds. Record in last six races:
Collide first turn; Steady jade; Tiring; Brief lead; Weakened; Gamely
. She’s won you three thousand four hundred dollars.”

“
What
!” I said. My stitches cracked.

Johnson finished counting green dollar bills onto the bedcover. “Three thousand four hundred. With a record like that, what do you think the odds were?”

I sat with my mouth open. I was still sitting like that when he waved, grinning, and began to go out of the room. I collected myself just in time to pack them away before the Begum arrived. I daresay my headache was still there, but I can’t say I felt it.

The sari was green, embroidered with peacocks today, and the Begum’s brown-shadowed eyes were, I think, quite genuinely solicitous. She sat down with not quite her usual grace and said, “Beltanno. My dear child. If only I had stopped you.”

“Well. It might have been a genuine call,” I said.

“The nurse tells me there will be no lasting effects. But you don’t mean to go back to Nassau today?” She actually looked worried.

I said, “Really, there’s nothing to keep me. Sir Bartholomew and Lady Edgecombe and Mr. Johnson are going, and I ought to accompany my patient back. I have to make my report.”

The Begum said sharply, “Beltanno, this is not economy, is it? The hospital are not so short of funds that they would force you to pay your own fare if you don’t take a free trip with Johnson?”

“I’m not worrying,” I said, and smiled cautiously. “Didn’t you hear of my windfall?”

The Begum regarded me. “From Lady…?”

She didn’t finish. It seemed too unlikely, I suppose. “No. From a bitch,” I said, “called Pally Loo-loo.”

I suppose I was slightly lightheaded. But I must say it gave me great pleasure to say it.

Before she left the Begum gave me two parcels. As I drew breath to refuse them civilly she sat down again on the edge of my bed and spoke first. “Beltanno. I gave you an unpleasant day yesterday. Some of it wasn’t my doing, but I did take you right out of your depth and keep you there for longer than I had any right to. It was like watching a good car trying to run with the choke out. This is my way of saying I’m sorry. If you don’t like them, don’t use them. Throw them away. You’ve got money now to buy something else. But it would please me very much if you took them.” She stopped, and smiled that sidelong, regal smile. “And Beltanno. There are no strings attached.”

I smiled a little, cautiously, back. “Or bridges?” I said.

The first parcel contained a straight sleeveless dress in plain Ottoman silk with a small high collar and some interesting anatomical seaming about the bust. The other contained a wig of dark hair, the exact shade of my own. But longer and fuller, with two little sweeps over the cheekbones. I drew the curtains around my bed and slipped it on rapidly, then took it off and thrust it under the bedclothes. It was not my face. But I needed something to travel in. Already, since I awakened, I had suffered the open smiles of every damned person who had come into my room. I couldn’t go to Miami Airport with the Edgecombes and Johnson and look like a freak.

I could wear a hat. But a hat in hot weather? And I hadn’t got a hat.

I hadn’t got a dress either. They’d searched the parking lot, and it had vanished. All I had was a good strong brassiere, a pair of sensible underpants, a girdle, a pair of 30-denier stockings, a cotton slip, and my Dr. Scholl sandals.

When the moment for discharge came, I put them all on, and the Begum’s blue dress on top. My slip showed four inches below it, and so had to come off. The ridge of my girdle, invisible under my own modest dress, also showed through the silk. My girdle had to come off, and with them my stockings. I wore my wig, my underpants, brassiere, the blue dress, and my sandals, and I felt indecently exposed: a brunette Jean Harlow. I went through all the necessary formalities, and joined Sir Bartholomew and Lady Edgecombe, by arrangement, in the entrance hall.

Sir Bartholomew was looking slightly drawn but a better color, I thought, than when I had last seen him. I realized he was staring at me, and then that Lady Edgecombe was drifting toward me, after a moment’s frozen assessment, like an Afghan hound sighting a color supplement photographer. I said icily, “The Begum kindly brought me some things for the journey.”

Lady Edgecombe came to a halt. “My dear. I’d never have
believed
it,” she said. Bart Edgecombe, just behind, put a hand on her shoulder. He said to me, “Maybe you’re sensitive about the change in your appearance. But let me say it’s very pretty.”

He had been really a very reasonable patient. “I’m afraid I don’t worry very much about my appearance, one way or the other,” I said. But not too sharply.

He made a movement of acknowledgment. “Your time is valuable. Of course. But do take the trouble sometimes, Doctor MacRannoch… It can be very pleasant for others.”

His wife smiled at him and I thought, smiling myself, that there was something to be said for taking the trouble to be diplomatic as well. It might be worth trying.

At the airport we met Johnson and boarded the Piper Twin Otter. Whether he knew of the Begum’s present I couldn’t detect; I rather thought not. But he merely tilted his head and said, “Very nice,” and then got on with the business of helping to stow Lady Edgecombe’s myriad cases. My medical bag, retrieved from the Columbus, was already there. The Begum and Krishtof Bey, I learned, were leaving that afternoon for Crab Island via Great Harbour Cay and Johnson himself was joining them shortly.

“Leaving Sir Bartholomew in Nassau?” I said.

“Don’t be tart,” Johnson said. “It’s not our fault we like you in drag. I shall stay in Nassau till Bart gets his clearance and then fly him to Great Harbour Cay with Denise. Today, I hope. You know they still want you to stay with them?”

Sir Bartholomew had brought this up on the way to the airport. I drew breath to restate my arguments, but the engine started and the subject was dropped. Miami and its waterways sank far below us: the golden webbed dome where Flipper played skittles daily… the hotels… the apartments… the dog track.

I smiled. I was still smiling vaguely when coffee came, and we saw below us the white curb of sand give way to the wide purple road of the Gulf Stream. I gazed out of the window, thinking, until we landed.

James Ulric was standing in front of the long sunshine-yellow block of airport buildings at Nassau looking furious in candy-striped Bermuda shorts. As we stood waiting by the plane for our luggage, he came stumping across on his spider legs, passed me, stopped, and whirled into reverse like an egg beater. “Great Jumping Christ,” he said. “The creature looks almost human.”

“Thank you, Father,” I said. “I am glad to hear it. I have decided, by the way, to marry Mr. T. K. MacRannoch. If the Begum names the day, we could make it a foursome.”

For a moment I thought he was going to jump straight into status asthmaticus, but he relaxed out of sheer spite. “Bloody undersexed doctor,” he said. “You’ve never met him. You wouldn’t marry him. And if you did, what’d you live on? Not a penny of my money or Thelma’s is going to that ill-gotten Nip.”

I picked up my case. “Then,” I said airily, “I’ll have to start betting on dogs,” and walked past him into the airport. Edgecombe had already pushed his wife off. Only Johnson, I noticed, had remained a blank spectator of the whole petty scene.

But he didn’t come after me and neither of course did my father, so I got the Edgecombes into the United Commonwealth on my own. I pulled off the wig in the airport lavatory on the way. I looked freakish all right, but that had nothing to do with my qualifications. I kept the Begum’s dress on because I had nothing else to wear.

The hospital of course was an obstacle course of cries and giggles and people running after me and trying to summon the courage to turn me about. You would think that after all they had seen in those wards, they would find a cropped head beneath their attention. Not so.

At any rate, Sir Bartholomew got his final examination; his clothes were collected and his wife’s from her hotel, and they were seen off at last for the airport, where Johnson awaited them. He was being as good as his word. The Twin Otter would fly them all to Great Harbour Cay. And from there, Johnson would sail to Crab Island.

Sir Bartholomew stood by the car a long time trying to persuade me to fly with them. I convinced him, I think, that a doctor’s job is not one which can be left indiscriminately. But I promised that I would ring him the first leave I got, and perhaps spend a weekend or longer at Great Harbour Cay. Then I went back to the hospital and was summoned before the chief medical officer, who asked what the hell I meant by coming on duty while I looked like a tough case of ringworm.

I remember looking blankly at him and saying that I felt quite all right.

“Maybe,” he said. “But McGonagall, I am less concerned with your medical health than with your ludicrous appearance. In this eminent hospital, as you are aware, the nursing staff is far from stable.”

“But—”

“— and far from according you sympathetic respect, is liable to ignore you while rolling about in fits of helpless hysteria… Well?”

“You’re short staffed,” I pointed out. I refrained from adding that the number of competent medical officers in my view was not very high.