Split Code (38 page)

Then I heard Donovan’s muffled voice say, ‘All righty: let’s blow the
bogomil
down. The workshop’s bursting with nitro. Go on, you. Get off your butt and go get it.’

Opposite me, Hugo’s smile showed wide and white under his moustache. A smile of total enjoyment, for all he was no better off now than we were.

For Johnson’s men were going to tape explosives to the door at our backs. And they had to be stopped. For between the blast and the ball, it would kill us.

I beat Johnson to it by a fraction. Just as he drew breath, I opened my mouth and screamed
‘Stop!’

The ball hung, sombre and silent, between us. As the first sibilant reached it, it stirred. Stirred, trembled, teetered, and then, polished and enormous, swung towards me.

There was an image on it of myself, pinheaded and bloated. It advanced, wider than I could dodge: too vast to hope to slip under.

From behind the ball Johnson’s voice, clear but not loud, said,
‘Repeat.’

Before the word was half spoken, the shining thing had stopped its advance. It halted, shook, and then slowly began to recede. The pin-headed figure dwindled. Air and space came in its place. I watched the ball, mesmerized, pick up speed. It was on its way, hurtling towards Johnson when it came to me what he had said. I shouted
‘Stop!’

The ball answered. It was uncanny. It was like calling a dog. In front of Johnson’s face it steadied, shuddering, and then began the return swing towards me. Voices outside exclaimed remotely. Someone said, ‘What is it?’ and someone else said, ‘There’s someone in there.’

The ball loomed: I came face to face again with my image. Johnson said, quickly and loudly,
‘Johnson, Joanna . . .”

I waited as long as I dared.
‘And Panadek,’
I added. The ball swung towards me.

Johnson said,
‘Don’t explode!!’
and the ball turned again.

Donovan’s voice shouted, ‘Got it.’ Insulated by the walls, sounds outside seemed to leave the ball quite impervious. The voice, stifled, continued, ‘What’s wrong? Can you tell us?’

In five syllables? It was all we could risk, and even that made the swing longer than was comfortable. I watched the ball and shouted,
‘Demolition . . .’ As
the ball left him, Johnson smiled. Then just before it reached me, he said ‘ . . .
ball.’

It was like bloody Scrabble. I waited, selecting and discarding, and came up with
‘Sensitive.’
The ball swung my way.

‘To sound,’
said Johnson; and as the ball was coming, made a fast drawing movement with his hand over the wall behind him.

I thought I knew what he meant, but I didn’t want to blow it I said,
‘Try to . . .’

And as the ball swung to me, Johnson finished it ...
Cut wall’

The ball receded. I stood there, limp with relief and exhaustion and actually watched Johnson’s eyebrows go up before I recovered my senses.

Message received, over and out. Except that it wasn’t over and out. We had to go on talking.

There was no time to think of words. I just screeched, and the ball stopped and came back to me. At the right moment, Johnson said politely,
‘Thank you,’
and grinned again. The ball turned towards him.

‘What now?’
I said. The ball turned.

‘Verse?’
he said. The ball left me. Something hit the wall behind us. I found I was smiling too. Verse, of course, with its regular beats, and its effortless feed-belt of words. I wondered what verses he knew. I said,
‘Incy . . .”

‘Christ. Wincey ...’
he said. I was right. Everyone knew that one.

‘Spider,
’ I said portentously.

‘Climbing . . .’

‘Up the . . .’

‘Spout.’

The ball swung like clockwork. The spider continued its saga. With time to think, I could hear the hammering going on between words, and then the high-pitched sound of a drill. In his workshop Hugo had every tool anyone could conceivably need. I even had a moment, between words, to glance at Hugo.

Leaning against the wall without moving, he really looked no different from all the other times I had been in his amusing, versatile company. In the gorilla suit in the Eisenkopps’ flat; shooting rustlers at Missy’s Golden American Wonderland: swimming out to save Johnson at Cape Cod in the little exploit which exposed Beverley so successfully. Inviting Simon to the party which reinstated me as a member of the Yugoslav expedition. Repairing the Brownbelly tape because it didn’t matter to him whether Vladimir was identified or not, because Vladimir was Gramps’s man, as all the men at the Wonderland had been . . . For Hugo all along had been the lone man, the jackal, the scavenger.

He looked the same, except that the smile under the moustache had resignation in it, and perhaps even a shadow of admiration. He could not, of course, speak. He didn’t have to.

We had got on to
The Gondoliers,
as I remember, by the time the oxy-acetylene cutter finally began to draw a line through the wall. Johnson, it turned out, had a moderately melodious tenor, and I had been one of the Kings of Barataria myself in my schooldays. It was a scramble to get some of the lines in, I distinctly remember, but we managed:
‘Replying we -’ ‘Say, as -’ ‘One indi -’ ‘Vidual. As I-’ ‘Find I’m a -’ ‘King, to my -’ ‘Kingdom I -’ ‘Bid you all. I’m a -’ ‘- Ware you oh -’ ‘Ject, to pa -’ ‘Vilions and -’ ‘Palaces, but you’ll -’ ‘Find I re -’ ‘Sped, Your Re -’ ‘- Publican fallacies ...’

We didn’t have to go any further. At just that point, a section of the wall fell out. It drew the ball to the sound. And, well trained as I was, I shouted, briskly, to summon it back.

I think Donovan must have thought Hugo, seen clear through the gap, was in process of torturing us. As, I suppose, he was. At any rate, he lunged through the opening and fired.

It caught Panadek in the shoulder and he yelled. And the ball turned and made for him.

It would have been poetic justice to let it go, but I had had enough poetry for one night. So had Johnson, it appeared. We shouted
‘Stop!’
at the same moment and then, feeling stupid, alternately until someone found the switch and the ball rose slowly into the ceiling and both doors opened.

Hugo still leaned against the wall, his hand gripping his shoulder and blood running down between his long fingers. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You ought to have been the toy designers and I ought to have been the nanny.’ Then he felt in his jacket and drawing out the brown manila envelope, tossed it towards us. ‘If it contains a page from the
Politika,
I don’t want to know it.’

‘It contains a page from the
Politika,’
Johnson said.

They had replaced the burst tyre on the Mercedes-Benz. Johnson drove down the mountain very carefully. We didn’t say very much because we were both flogged. Indeed Johnson’s hands, when he took them off the wheel, were trembling. And I was wrestling, as it happened, with my conscience.

Then, instead of going round to the harbour where
Dolly
was, Johnson drew up at the Hotel Mimosa in Herceg-Novi.

There was a blue and white police van standing outside, under the orange trees. I said rudely, ‘Oh bloody hell,’ and sat there with my eyes full of tears.

Johnson glanced at me and then away again. He said, ‘There were some things that neither Hugo nor Eisenkopp could have done. Engineering the Warr Beckenstaff for you. The M.M.A. badges that identified the party at the Wonderland. The torn note in your pocket. The introduction of Lazar to Charlotte. The way Panadek found out about the whole of Gramps’s scheme, right from the beginning . . . But I didn’t know you knew.’

‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Not until I saw that futile apron nappy round Benedict’s legs in the basement. He’s been wearing a kite nappy for weeks now.’

Bunty came out between two policemen as we went through the doors. She too looked just the same, with frizzed hair standing out round her earrings. She had her high-heeled boots on and if she was pale, the make-up hid it. She just looked annoyed. In fact, she pretended not to see me as they went past. I wondered where Gramps had picked her up and how they came to have joined forces.

She was a hard case; out for herself and for money: the fate of the Croats would mean nothing to Bunty. Was it through the nanny network, for example, that she found out that Mike Widdess worked for MI5, which let her sell the information later to Gramps? I didn’t know yet if she worked alone, or with partners. Or if her team or Gramps had faked that car crash in which Mike Widdess died. Perhaps we should be surprised, looking over her record, to find how often she had been employed in a household where the child had been threatened with kidnapping.

One had to suppose that she had played along both Gramps and Panadek in other ways too. Panadek for merely the hell of it. I expect he gave her gifts. He certainly rummaged her rooms and her mail, and when he found out what she was up to, he had merely to plant his microphones and stand by for the prize money. Or rather, the Folio.

Panadek, whom she thought of simply as a sucker to go to bed with, had been too clever for Bunty all along.

Johnson was speaking to someone in Serbo-Croat. He turned back to me and said, ‘Their room’s on the first floor.’ I didn’t think he had remembered. Then I saw I was looking again at the reflection of myself in his face. I said, ‘Where did the glasses come from?’

‘I keep a spare set in the car,’ Johnson said. ‘Didn’t you notice?’

I hadn’t. Indeed, if you asked, I could have sworn he did at least half of that journey down those serpentine bends without any glasses at all. Then I forgot about it, because we came to a door and Johnson stopped and said, ‘You go in.’

It was Sukey’s crying that burst on the ears as soon as I turned the handle. Grover wasn’t crying although his face was all swollen with past excesses, and there were green tracks down to his chin, and he had wet himself all through his Daniel Hechter trendy tapestry two-piece. He was trying to feed Sukey with an arm round her lolling head and a cup of water pressed overflowing into her toothless mouth. Wherever Bunty had been, she hadn’t been near them for hours and hours.

Then I went in and Grover looked round. His face, so like Comer Eisenkopp’s, was white and defiant and frightened. Then he recognized me, and said, ‘You was not hurting Sukey.’

‘I know you weren’t,’ I said. ‘Sukey’s going to have a nice dinner now, and so is Grover.’

I was in the middle of saying it when Beverley burst through the doorway beside me. They must have sent for her. Her red dress was stained and her careful blonde hair was a mess. What she had, she was going to have to make the best of. No more money for the Radoslav Clinic. Not as Comer’s wife, anyhow.

Then she ran to the bed and kneeling, flung her arms round both Grover and Sukey, crying so that both the kids began screaming at once. But it was the right kind of yelling; open and hearty and angry, with no panic in it. I backed to the door, and came out, and faced Johnson.

‘I know. Bloody kids,’ he said, and gave me his handkerchief. Then we drove to the
Dolly.

I flew home the next day, to my father.

I only ever fell in love with one man, and he was married. Then his wife died, and the next time we met he had bifocal glasses and a yacht and was a walking chemical factory.

Meanwhile I had other girls’ children.

Published by House of Stratus

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