Johnson-Johnson 06 – Dolly and the Nanny Bird (15 page)

Johnson said, ‘He used one belonging to Beverley. Donovan found it in her room.’

Donovan, I noted, had been visiting Bunty. A special agent’s life clearly isn’t all Busy Lizzie and thorns. I said acidly, ‘If you’ve been getting into their houses, then presumably you’ve discovered something worth knowing.’

I caught the tail end of my father’s smile. He said, ‘We’ve done a bit on telephone calls. Comer Eisenkopp has been phoning Italy, but then he has business interests everywhere. The same applies to Panadek, who has made a number of calls to Europe recently: Lübeck as well as Yugoslavia. The only other item of note has rather mystified us. Donovan was given a plant by old Mr Eisenkopp.’

After the rodeo. I remembered. ‘It was poisoned?’ I ventured. Hopefully.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if my father had nodded. Instead he said merely, ‘It was bugged. Everything said in Donovan’s room was supposed to be relayed somewhere. Anyone in the Eisenkopp household could have fixed up that plant with a microphone. Or anyone in the Booker-Rahmans’, for that matter. We were worried for a while that someone had spotted Donovan. We think now it was merely an attempt to plot Benedict’s movements. Donovan has been feeding it assiduously with mixed information. And he checks your room every day with a bug-alert.’

I must admit I relaxed. I said, ‘I have a favourite theory. The villain is Mrs Warr Beckenstaff herself, in the market for all the stuff in the Folio. By herself, or with Simon, or Rosamund. They could blackmail themselves quietly for weeks while they tried to pump you or me or the Department at leisure. And, of course, they’d be sure nothing happened to Benedict.’

Whatever passed between the two men, it wasn’t a murmur of awestruck agreement. Johnson said, ‘It’s possible, yes. Someone made quite strenuous efforts to have you employed by the Booker-Readman family, but it mightn’t have been Rosamund or her mother. Vladimir threw you together at Winnipeg. Another parent or nanny could have recommended you to Ingmar. Any one of your colleagues, knowing you to be somewhere in Canada, could have encouraged the Booker-Readmans to call at that shindig at Winnipeg. Such as Charlotte.’

His pipe had gone out. He drew an ashtray towards him and tapped it. ‘I give you an interesting thought. There was no kidnapping attempt at Cape Cod. Charlotte, Grandpa Eisenkopp and Rosamund Booker-Readman were not at Cape Cod, alone of all those we’ve mentioned.’

‘That,’ I said, ‘is ridiculous. You might as well say it wasn’t Charlotte who ran a launch over you. There might not have been a kidnapping but there was bloody nearly a murder, as I remember it.’

‘You mean,’ my father said, ‘the episode involving Panadek and the dinghy? We considered it, but thought it was harmless. If Panadek had wanted Johnson dead, he would have been dead, and not rescued.’

I said, ‘No one knows who you are, then?’ to Johnson.

He rolled on one hip, hunting with concentration for tobacco. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the general notion. They think you know nothing. All the same, they’re bound to keep their eyes open for any obvious bulldogs. Excluding, one hopes, dead-ass limeys who can’t fasten seat-belts. On the other hand…’ He broke off what he was going to say. He had found the tobacco.

‘On the other hand,’ my father said, ‘this idiot painter is our barometer. He’s alive. And that’s how we know they haven’t decoded the Malted Milk Folio. Anything else?’

I folded my hands together again. ‘The ikon. The Lesnovo ikon: what about that? Simon was flogging copies to Comer, and both his wife and Beverley seem to know; but so far neither has split on him.’

My father looked at Johnson, and Johnson fielded it for me. It was like bloody Pinky and Perky. He said, ‘If you remember, your launderette acquaintance Vladimir was an ikon painter, as well as being one of the three men you chased in the Wonderland. Poor Simon doesn’t really seem much of a conspirator. A clever man playing for very high stakes would never have got involved with Beverley, or with a doubtful trade in spurious ikons; but because of all these things, he might have made a reasonable tool. I wondered if Vladimir could be blackmailing him.’

‘So?’ I said. I knew my father was watching my face.

‘So I copied the Lesnovo ikon myself. Eighteen double night-trips to that basement for nothing, as it turned out. I put the genuine ikon into the parcel Simon took to the Eisenkopps and hung my own copy in its place in the basement. It was the first thing Simon went to look at, of course, when he got back to his house. Naturally, he thought he had been double-crossed by the painter who did his copies, and phoned him. I hoped it would be Vladimir, but it wasn’t.’

‘So you are no further on,’ I said. ‘Vladimir could still be blackmailing him.’

‘So I’m no further on,’ he agreed. ‘Except that I have a name or two for the New York city police when all this is over, and the Eisenkopps have the ikon they paid for. The Robin Hood of the paint box.’ He got up unexpectedly, leaving his pipe where it was, and strolling to the end of the desk, stood with his hands on either side of his seat, surveying my father. There were worn leather squares on his elbows and his cavalry twills, planked a little apart, were undeniably bagged at the knees.

‘All right. Don’t be impatient,’ my father said. ‘I’ve had your plan, and I approve of it. Now you’ve stopped smoking that bloody thing, in fact, we might as well settle down and get on with it. The drinks cupboard is behind you and if it’s rye, I don’t want it.’

I thought of the Eskimos and opened my mouth, it must be told, to comment on any plan made by Johnson Johnson. Then, although he wasn’t looking at me, I shut it again.

The Eskimo episode had placed me firmly where the Department wanted me to be: in the Booker-Readmans“ household. And it had flushed out for inspection all those who might be interested in Benedict and in me: such as, for example, Vladimir. Behind the continuous floor-show existed a gentleman who was no slouch and never had been, even when I was seventeen.

The discussion only took ten more minutes and Johnson and I had perhaps three more together after my father had gone and before he also slipped out by a back door, to make his way back to New York. I said, ‘I should have guessed. About you, I mean.’

‘I know. It’s annoying, isn’t it?’ said Johnson. ‘Like not getting the solution to yesterday’s crossword. You probably don’t realise it, but both your parents have put quite a lot of time and energy into keeping you out of the muddier bits of the field.’

Mother too, then. I said, ‘What brought you into it? Or were you always in from the beginning, and the portraits came after?’

He had stopped on his way to the door and looked as if he might continue to drift out at any second, though the pipe in his hand had been lit again. He said, ‘Oh, the painting came first. The rest, through Naval Intelligence: a popular way of recruiting legalised conmen. They expect you to tie all your victims in reef knots… Does this whole scheme appear fairly nerve-wracking? I’m sorry there’s no other way. But they won’t kidnap you without the baby, or the baby without you. We have to let them have the matched set or nothing.’

‘Well, let’s put it this way,’ I said. ‘If it had been anyone else I’d have said no. Do I see you again before Yugoslavia?’

‘Not unless anything goes wrong. I’ll be on the flight, of course, and I’d like to have the pleasure of showing you
Dolly
. Lenny Milligan, who looks after it, is a very good sort of gent.’

He put his pipe in his mouth and had been walking to the door as he was speaking, but when he got there he turned, his hand still on the knob. ‘Joanna?’

‘What?’ I said.

He was looking at me through the top halves of the bifocals. ‘If it comes to a shoot-out, Benedict is my affair. Look after yourself and leave the baby to me. It isn’t what I told your father I’d do, but that way, he’ll live even if you don’t. Check?’

No slouch, and a bloody psychologist into the bargain. I did say ‘Check,’ after a moment, but he had gone by that time.

I spent the afternoon very, very privately, at the dentist’s.

Three days later, Bunty and I flew to Dubrovnik in a Warr Beckenstaff charter plane, ankle-deep in orchids and Bollinger. Since we had the three kids with us, both were necessary.

Along with us flew all Ingmar’s guests who were not already in Europe. They included both Booker-Readmans, the Eisenkopps, Hugo Panadek and Joshua Gibbings, the family doctor. And, of course, Johnson and Donovan, with his arm in a sling. I didn’t know who had rehired Donovan, but I strongly suspected Rosamund.

I was glad to see him, if unable to show it. However well organised you may be, it is a well known truth that eight hours in the air with a child can drive all thoughts from your mind except possibly those of public suicide. Benedict’s cot swung hammockwise from the ceiling, and there wasn’t one of the crew or the passengers who failed to chuck him under the chin whenever passing. When he flaked out after three hours of crying it was probably because he was punch-drunk.

Sukey, also clipped to the ceiling with her Lolo Boochie Soft Camel, fared rather better, through her preference for wearing her hat on her face, which produced a knitted landscape not conducive to chucking. Every now and then Bunty cleared the pattern with cotton wool buds in the nose area. Sukey, who was teething, was in trouble at both ends and kept Bunty busy while I inherited the problem of Grover, who could sit on a potty, musical or otherwise, until kingdom come, and still have an emergency as soon as the lunch trays were with us.

Around me, concealing a murderer, was the Yugoslav party Johnson said must be treated as hostile. No doubt. I was busy. And avoiding, if it must be known, the bright, steam-cleaned glances of Donovan. Our forthcoming three days together on
Dolly
I was looking forward to with some ambivalence.

But for Bunty and her two kids, everyone else on the plane would be living on board Ingmar’s
Glycera
. Bunty, her hair newly frizzed, was off to a seaside hotel thirty miles south of Dubrovnik with Sukey and Grover and an envelopeful of addresses from Charlotte. I couldn’t see Bunty getting to Zagreb or Sarajevo, but there were a couple of boyfriends in the Dubrovnik/Herceg-Novi vicinity whom she’d marked with two stars and a question mark. One was called Jesus Krysztof and the other Lazar Dogíc. I’d been offered my pick, but had pointed out that I’d be bloody well immured on
Dolly
. With Donovan.

What Bunty did was obviously not weighing too much on her happy employers. Ever since their hospitality to the baby and me had wrung an invitation from the reluctant Warr Beckenstaffs, they had been lying about producing alphas like fortune cookies. Bunty said they’d had four hundred special cards printed, headed
As from the M/T Glycera
, and had found out how to spell Omar, Ira, Merle and Bianca. She thought they could manage Sammy, Peter, Grace, Cary, the Aga, the Bedfords and Jackie O already, or were prepared to risk it.

I hoped her list was accurate.
Glycera
habitués tend to have a short season, like cauliflowers. I also remembered with interest that according to Hugo, Beverley Eisenkopp had booked her bed at the Radoslav clinic four weeks before Ingmar invited her. So sure had she been, clearly, of wangling it.

I wished I could have asked her how. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen Beverley since I came back from Toronto, bearing the glad news that I had found a nurse-housekeeper for my ailing aunt Lily. Bunty had hardly left for her day off before her employer sent me a message. Would I bring Ben to spend the afternoon with Grover and Sukey, who had been missing me.

Considering that their mother had been willing to pay ten thousand dollars to arrange my permanent absence, I might be forgiven for receiving that sourly. But I took some routine precautions, and went. Donovan, as I remember, volunteered to stand outside the door.

The principal Eisenkopp sitting-room is forty feet long and apart from Grover and Sukey contained only Mrs Eisenkopp herself, looking teenage and vulnerable in levis and a lumberjack shirt, with thick blonde hair falling down to her shoulderblades, and smelling of Sukey’s lamb dinner.

She said, ‘1 wanted to talk to you,’ and did, eventually, with both of us locked in the bathroom, this being the only place within earshot in which we could discuss the topic of adultery with any assurance of privacy.

The opening gambit, delivered with her incredible lashes downturned in her exquisite profile, was that she supposedly found it a pretty strange scene, someone with a nice home and two fine kids and a wonderful husband like Mr Eisenkopp even thinking of dating another man. The development, which was slightly confused, had, I finally worked out, something to do with Mr and Mrs Richard Burton. The conclusion was predictable. ‘It happens once in a hundred years to a girl, and you can’t say no,’ said Beverley Eisenkopp, raising her voice a little above the noise of Grover kicking the door in. ‘I love my husband, Nurse Joanna, but Simon Booker-Readman is my prince. We were made for one another.’

They had certainly fitted very well into the Jacuzzi bath. I said, ‘You aren’t thinking of a divorce?’

She put the lid on the lavatory seat and sat on it. ‘Have I done any God-damned thing but think?’ she said peevishly. ‘Of course all I ask is a golden future with Simon – but what would be the cost? Two fine homes destroyed, my husband’s peace of mind gone, the mental health of three little children damaged for ever. I wouldn’t do that to my children, Joanna.’

I took it as a good sign that I had become Joanna, and said, ‘It’s none of my business anyway, Mrs Eisenkopp. You can be quite sure that no one among your family or friends will hear about it through me.’

She lifted her lashes and there were beautiful tears in them. ‘Do you mean that?’ she said. ‘Do you really mean it? But you hardly know me. Is it for the sake of those lovely children?’

To the sound of Grover’s feet and Grover’s voice, hoarse with rage, was added the rattle of the doorknob, violently turned from outside. I said ‘Well, they’ve got Bunty, of course. But certainly, it means a great deal to both of the children to have you there as much as possible. Grover is doing all this because he wants you to love him, you know.’