Split Code (24 page)

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘You’re Jesus Krysztof?’

Charlotte’s boyfriend. As it happened, he wasn’t. He was the other one.

‘Lazar Dogíc,’ he said. His lids bunched with glee, and also against the clouds of grey smoke from his filter-fag. ‘Our names are difficult. Charlotte has much fun with mine. How is she; is she well? She is not with you?’

I explained. I further explained about Mrs Eisenkopp. He knew all about her cancelled operation but not about her urgent desire to be vaccinated. In two minutes, equality had acquired a slight bend, and the American lady had been slipped from the queue by another nurse with laced boots with no toes and heels.

I followed. We were led to a neat room with clean parquet flooring where a trolley already stood by an armchair. While Lazar Dogi’c administered the vaccine, I waited outside and tried to guess from the dialogue where he had punctured her.

Wherever it was, it made Dr Dogíc’s day: his fresh cigarette had dimples all round it when he eventually emerged. Beverley herself was rather blotched, and a line had sneaked out from the Wig ‘n Lift and landed between her arched eyebrows. At the same time, you couldn’t say she was mournful, either over the smallpox or Comer. It turned out that it was Dr Dogíc’s birthday, and Beverley had asked him to join us and Johnson in a drink. We all sallied forth to find the square, the statue and Johnson.

I remember at that point feeling momentarily free. I trusted Lenny with Ben. I believed Johnson when he said that the baby and I ran no danger when we were separate. I ought, no doubt, to be making a valuable study of my companions but my companions were getting along perfectly well together and had been here before and were going to be here again, and I wasn’t.

Fate, or the Department, or Johnson had brought me to this medieval city state without traffic, and I wanted to rubberneck. To drift with others along its main street, paved with brilliant white marble like parquet. To lift my eyes to the handsome stone buildings with their red pantile roofs and rows of green swallow-tailed shutters. To linger in front of each arch of the knee shops, door and window and counter in one, which for three hundred years had formed each side of the street into a range of mysterious caverns.

Too quickly we reached the square at the end, surrounded by Renaissance and Gothic arched palaces and containing a freestanding pillar with the real nice statue of a longhaired knight with sword and shield in its niche.

Johnson wasn’t behind the shield or sitting on the steps on the other side of the column, unless he had been flattened by the five hundred odd people who were standing there instead, their backs to us. Beverley said, ‘What’s going on? Are they running a sweepstake?’ as she picked her way like the rest of us over a carpet of pigeons.

Charlotte’s boyfriend said, ‘No, they are watching the weddings. You see in front of you the Municipal Palace. There. Beside the belfry and the small fountain. And someone waves to you, perhaps your friend, from the Gradska Kafana? The City Café? On the terrace there?’

It was Johnson. But I wasn’t looking at Johnson. Below the white balustrades of the City Café, and smothered bonnets, radiators, windows and boots with mixed flowers and greenery, were parked five desecrating automobiles. As we stared, a discreet croak behind us scattered first the pigeons and then the crowds to admit a sixth car which also halted in front of the Palace.

A girl in a long coarse white dress and short veil got out, followed by three men in good suits with carnations in their buttonholes and another girl in a long purple dress. They disappeared inside the building and the driver backed his car into line with the others.

‘I told you,’ Johnson said when we joined him at his table. ‘It’s the only thing they allow cars inside the city for. They’ll be out in twenty minutes. Did you meet someone you knew?’ Dr Dogíc had lingered behind to speak to one of the drivers.

‘A boyfriend of Charlotte’s,’ I said. ‘He’s coming to join us. He gave Mrs Eisenkopp her vaccination and it’s his birthday, so we rather owe him something, if you don’t mind.’

‘Perhaps I ought to go and bring him,’ Johnson said; and vanished, like the Cheshire Cat, while his voice was still displacing sound waves. I picked up the wine list. It was in the Roman alphabet, not the Cyrillic for a wonder, and I was reading under the Zestoka Picā or Strong Drinks and hovering between Gin Gilbey’s and J. Walker at 15 Dinari when Johnson and Lazar came back and orders for
sljivovica
went flying about like the pigeons.

Plum brandy at five in the afternoon needs to be treated with caution. I treated it with caution, which gave me a ringside view of Beverley lightly sloshed, going into her adored-little-girl act for Johnson and Lazar, both of whom had lost no time in chatting her up. Peals of silvery laughter greeted Johnson’s every graven-faced observation which were still effortlessly prolific no matter how high he was becoming. On the other hand there was Lazar’s charm, laid on with all the pure Balkan style which had placed him, obviously, on Charlotte’s mailing list.

In between observing the Municipal Palace disgorge married couples like parking tickets I watched the handsome brown doctor down four separate tumblers of
sljivovica
with no visible change in his smile or his
macho,
and wondered how long it would take Mr Eisenkopp’s Beverley to recall that all the animation she was wasting on the habitués of the City Café would be better employed exclusively on Johnson and the other beautiful or powerful people on board the
Glycera.
Or Dr Dogíc, who appeared to know the whole of female Dubrovnik, to cease smiling and waving and remember the birthday party he had spent some energy fruitlessly inviting us severally to.

I wondered what sort of head Johnson had for plum brandy. Sober, I watched the setting sun flame on the ribbed pantile roofs high over our heads and light the wings of the swifts as they swept up from the dark of the ancient Platea Comunis and squeaked and wheeled against the rose-coloured pines of Mount Srdj. Now the shutters were up and lights glimmered in all the arched windows and, a moment later, sprang along the main street as the people of Dubrovnik strolled out to take the evening air. A little wind started up and Beverley shivered and turned to pull on her green cashmere jacket, with help from each side. Then, smiling, she rose.

She had remembered. Beverley Eisenkopp had taken a great many pains to acquire that coveted invitation on board the
Glycera,
and she wasn’t going to be diverted now.

We all left the café together. Three more people among the strollers, two of them ravishingly pretty girls, waved to Dr Dogíc and he waved back, smiling. He was a popular boy. His polo-necked sweater, I noted, had been bought in Italy, and the thick gold ring on his little finger had a passable diamond in it. He said caressingly to Beverley, ‘You need help to find the way to your car? I come with you.’

I watched him take her arm. I was still watching when he winked at me.

I didn’t wink back, but I grinned. Conquering the impulse to look at Johnson almost killed me, both then and when we began to climb the steep street to the north wall and Lazar’s hand, leaving Beverley, brushed the stout inverted pleat in my faithful green Maggie Bee trenchcoat.

I was entertained. Charlotte’s boyfriends always had bags of initiative, and no mid-European cavalier was going to offend the wealthier and more important of two possible dates by making up to both at once. None of that, however, was going to stop Dr Dogíc from trying to have his cake and eat it. Also, one bitchily had to remember, the Radoslav Clinic knew to a day just how old Beverley was. I went on climbing steadily, and hoped, also bitchily, that Johnson had noticed.

It was getting dark. Overhead, the strip of sky between the tall leaning houses was inky blue, and the infrequent lanterns threw odd jagged shadows on the peeling walls and doorways and balconies. A gleaming brass plate announced advokat and another in English directed to
Disco-Bar with Disc jokey.
There was a smell of cats, and Dijamant filter cigarettes, and cooking. Behind us in the square the last of the wedding cars, honking and afforested with waving arms, swept along the Placa, displacing the sauntering citizens.

It was all implacably foreign, and made one think of things I had heard about Yugoslavia during the war. How in one small town, every professional man, every doctor and teacher had been taken and executed in reprisal for German officers killed by the Resistance. How after the war, nine old women had been discovered living alone in one mountain village, where every other soul had either lost his life fighting or had been taken and shot. As we climbed higher I could see the neon sign of the Labirint, the night club built on the site, they said, of a wartime Gestapo torture chamber.

I said to Lazar, ‘Don’t you see ghosts, when you go over there to dance?’

The street was wide enough - just - for three people. He tucked the hand that wasn’t holding Beverley under my arm. ‘Why should we? Do you see ghosts in Dublin Castle? We are a collection of different races in Yugoslavia, with different languages, different religions, different customs.’

‘Then I suppose you were lucky,’ said Johnson from behind, ‘that a man like President Tito was able to hold you all together for so long. When he goes, what will happen?’

Still holding my arm, Lazar turned his head smiling, over his shoulder. ‘Ask the politicians. They control us. I am only a doctor. Here is the gateway, and there is the car park. You see, Izlaz means exit.’

The sign, distressingly, said ИЭЛАЭ. Lazar said ‘You have no Serbo-Croat?’ And when we all shook our heads, ‘Ah, but you will manage very well. Most speak English. And now I must leave you. Good-bye, my dear Mrs Eisenkopp. Good-bye, Mr Johnson. Is it possible, Joanna, before you leave, that I might give you a message for Charlotte?’

The message, delivered in a smiling undertone as the others got into the car was, as one might have guessed, a pressing invitation to Lazar Dogíc’s birthday party. ‘The others will be on the
Glycera,
is it not? Then you are free.’

‘You don’t know how tempting it is,’ I said. ‘But I’m looking after a baby on Mr Johnson’s yacht and we shan’t even be tied up in the harbour. They’re afraid of kidnapping, and we have to spend the night at anchor somewhere. I’m so sorry.’

‘So Mr Johnson has said. But this is no problem. There are boats. There are two men on board, Mr Johnson says, who attend to the baby this afternoon. Why can you not leave the baby with them for this evening?’

He patted me on the shoulder. ‘It is settled. I shall come for you.’

‘It isn’t settled,’ I said. Behind us, Beverley had leant over and pressed Johnson’s car horn. ‘Look, I have to go. Have a wonderful party. I’ll tell Charlotte I met you.’

He continued to grin. ‘I shall come,’ he said. He was still waving as we drove off.

Lenny Milligan brought the
Dolly
under motor to the quayside to pick us all up and take us across to where the
Glycera,
dressed overall with strings of coloured lights, lay floodlit on the ocean like Selfridge’s.

Ben, neatly stowed in his carrycot, was pinkly asleep and had been so, Donovan said, for four hours. After all, it was what I’d been counting on, but none the less I was pleased. I left him a few minutes longer while I got out orange juice and beef soup and the next bottle ready to warm, and found out how Johnson’s galley cooker functioned. I spread polythene sheets and unpacked baby gear, while footsteps above, and voices, and the thud of dropped ropes gave way to the surge of the engine and the kind of motion that told we were now on our way to the
Glycera.

Beverley’s face needed fixing. She made straight for the heads, and didn’t come near me again. Donovan put his head round the door and said, ‘My God, you should smell the plum brandy. Where’ve you lot all been?’ and then withdrew when I grinned but didn’t stop working. I had gone to lift Benedict when the engine stopped and we coasted, by the sounds, up to the
Glycera.

They let Beverley on board this time: I heard her voice on the cruise boat’s companionway, followed by the bumps of her baggage ascending. The door opened and Johnson said, ‘All right, Joanna?’

Because my whole attention was on Ben, I said ‘Yes, he’s fine. You’re off now, are you?’ without thinking. It did strike me that he looked pretty sober for the amount of Zestoka Picā he had consumed. Benedict’s eyes were still shut but his lips began to push in and out. I slipped my hands a little further under him, ready to lever.

Johnson said, ‘I don’t know what the bloody hell your father was thinking of.’

That found its way through the jet lag. My hands still under the baby, I gave Johnson my abrupt attention. ‘I’m sorry. I’m stupid. Don’t worry. I do remember why we’re here. Is there anything more I can do?’

From outside, we could hear calling voices. Johnson said, ‘No. We’ve been over it all. Don’t trust the doctor.’

‘Lazar Dogíc? He was trying to lure me on shore,’ I said. ‘I thought you said that so long as Ben and I were separated . . . ?’

‘I know. But don’t trust him all the same. Good luck,’ Johnson said.

Even after he said it, he didn’t move for a moment, although Lenny’s voice had now joined the others calling his name. I said again, ‘Don’t worry. It’s my own father I’m doing it for.’

It sounded discourteous but he understood probably because he gave one of his less glassy smiles before he walked off and boarded the
Glycera.
It was Ben himself, squirming against my two hands, who dragged my mind back to the baby.

My nose was pricking again, But that was jet lag as well as other emotions. Including, if you must know, plain terror.

Over supper Donovan and I revised our relationship. My second profession appeared to fascinate him.

‘Like crossword puzzles?’ he said helpfully. ‘I bet you sure beat the crap out of a crossword puzzle.’

All he appeared to know about coding was that you needed a book by Charles Dickens and the ability to count up to twenty-six. I didn’t ask him how he got into Intelligence work. I did ask him if he had ever played ice hockey in his life and he said yes, twice; but it was a great way to impress chicks. He was a great admirer of Johnson.