Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (16 page)

Sergeant Trotter said, “Well, it usually boils down to money. Who gets the nest egg?”

“There wasn’t any,” said Johnson. He sat up, opening his eyes, and taking out a clean handkerchief, began to dry the blackened bowl of his pipe reproachfully. “They were comfortable, but far from the top of the cheese trolley. No heavy insurance either, and no family.”

“No Queen of Sheba either, Thelma,” said my father, and cackled. He appeared to have found what he wanted; he sat down in another chair with a thick file of papers on his knee. “You’re on the wrong track.”

The Begum stretched her elegant legs on her lounge chair. The furniture on Crab Island, I had to admit, was lusher than Castle Rannoch had ever possessed. “There are other reasons for murder. He was in the diplomatic service abroad. What about you, Rodney? Did you get cashiered in Aden for selling cut-price juke boxes to oil sheiks? Does Sir Bartholomew know the secret of your horrible past?”

Sergeant Rodney Trotter was a little man in quite excellent health. But for a moment the veins stood out on his cheeks, and I thought his upper plate was going to drop. He said, “Why me?”

“You were at the airport and on the plane and in the Bamboo Conch Club,” said the Begum. She was clever. And idle. And enjoying herself.

“I wasn’t on the golf course,” said Trotter.

The Begum stretched herself luxuriously. “If you could pay a waiter at the Conch Club, you could pay a groundsman at Great Harbour Cay,” she said.

“Then why pick on me?” said Sergeant Trotter. He was becoming angry. “It might have been anyone, by that reckoning. Anyone else on that plane. Someone on the BOAC staff.”

“But I gather,” said the Begum gently, “no one else knew Sir Bartholomew, or had any dealings with him, or indeed was likely ever to see him again. No one else in the Monarch Lounge was going to stay on or near Great Harbour Cay. Except, of course, for Mr. Brady.”

More sophisticated by far than Trotter, Wallace Brady had of course been waiting for it. He grinned at the Begum, his hands clasped over his pale cotton stomach. “I’ve been here six months, and I’m going to be here a good few months yet. If Bart Edgecombe knew any dirty secrets from my past, I feel we would have slugged it out long before now.”

James Ulric, hugging his file, produced an actionable grin.

“Maybe it wasn’t an old blot in the games book, Brady. They tell me you were seeing a lot of Denise.”

Wallace Brady got up. “Begum,” he said. “Enough is enough. The lady we are talking about is dead, and you’re acting like it was a game. The Edgecombes were neighbors of mine, and I did all a good neighbor would do. That’s all there ever was to it. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to take Beltanno out and show her the gardens.”

The Begum got up, but James Ulric didn’t stir. He nodded at me. “Some day that girl will be worth nearly three million dollars,” he said. “You should get your hooks into her, now Denise is out of the way. Although she tells me she’s going to marry an effing Japanese… Have you asked him yet?” he demanded.

I stared at him and said, “No. But I shall.”

“Who?” said Wallace Brady. He was looking at me as if I’d just knocked down his hamster on a Suzuki 120.

“Mr. Tiko,” I said.

“Great jumping Jesus,” said Wallace Brady.

“I suppose,” said my father, “I should ask him to the Gathering. We are having a Bahamian Steel Band leaping through flaming circles on motorcycles. Since accidents are so plentiful, no doubt he could have one.”

“I shall arrange it,” said Krishtof Bey.

We had forgotten him. Even the Begum turned around sharply, and he smiled up at her from where he reclined on the carpet. “Am I not a suspect too?” he said. “I have been in all the right places at all the right times, although I have not yet found a motive. The lovely Denise? But I barely met her. A sordid event in my past? But all dancers have lascivious pasts: it is expected of them. No one can blackmail a dancer.”

“Let’s pretend,” said Johnson suddenly, “that you were wanted for some major crime, say in Turkey, which would involve a long prison sentence. A top dancer wouldn’t remain a top dancer, would he, if he had to spend ten years breaking stones in a quarry?”

Krishtof Bey put both hands to his head, spun around, and fell full length, with a light thud, at Johnson’s feet. “Save me! Save me!” he screamed.

I gazed at the magnificent lumbar area of his vertebral column as the Begum said, “Foolish boy. No one suspects you. You haven’t the application.”

The dancer rose compactly to his feet, his face rigid with hauteur. “You say no application to me? When I practice seven hours a day?”

“You don’t practice hate seven hours a day,” said the Begum calmly. “That is a European trait, Krishtof. Besides, you would kill with a knife.”

“And you?” said the dancer. He tossed back his long hair and seizing her chiffon scarf from a chair, draped it swiftly over his head and shoulders, one slender hand holding it in place. His walk and carriage had changed: he was the impudent replica of the Begum herself. “You, Thelma, have been much in evidence. What did Sir Bartholomew and his wife know of you that you preferred the MacRannoch and his daughter should not know?”

For a moment the beautiful, ageing face was quite still; then she drew the scarf from his hands and flicked it lightly around his throat. “That my friends don’t play cricket or bridge. Who are the false eyelashes for?”

“Johnson,” said the dancer immediately, his faun’s mouth lifting. He had quick wits. Nor did the lightly accented voice have any trouble at all with its English. I saw with misgiving that his eyelashes
were
false. He gazed through them at Johnson’s Aertex shirt and shambling trousers. “He is going to paint me, is he not? In the sun, in my natural state. An animal, a leopard. Lithe and lordly. Pan leaning against a tree trunk. A hibiscus flower here and there?”

Johnson looked uneasy. “I’m a rather splashy painter,” he said.

The Begum drew her veil lightly from Krishtof’s throat. “Are you trying to shock Johnson?” she said. “You won’t.” The brittle gaze, wavering around, rested on the impassive bifocals. “You boring, smug little man,” she said. “I was hoping for a colorful morning. And now you say all these events are pure accidents.”

“I don’t,” said Johnson. He was filling his pipe. The muscles of my abdominal wall recoiled like a spring and I choked. No one noticed.

“You did,” said my father. “You said…”

“
You
said they were accidents,” said Johnson. “Actually, Sir Bartholomew was poisoned with arsenic, and his wife Denise was undoubtedly killed. Beltanno will corroborate.” He struck a match and puffed at his pipe.

Everybody stared at him. The Begum sat down, and after a moment Krishtof Bey slid to her feet. My father remained seated, his bony finger still keeping the place in his unspeakable papers. Trotter and Wallace Brady, by contrast, both slowly rose to their feet. No one spoke.

Johnson wagged the match, dropped it, and took the pipe comfortably out of his mouth. “All right, Thelma?” he said. “Status redeemed? Pumped up the prelunch adrenalin?”

Someone let out a long sigh. The Begum half relaxed, still staring at Johnson. “You hideous creature. You are trying to reenter my good books?”

“Not at all,” said Johnson. “I never touch a good book before lunchtime. It
is
nearly lunchtime?”

“Then they were accidents?” Brady said. He was still standing.

“Beltanno says not,” said Johnson blandly. “She took stomach tests, which the hospital didn’t. And she’s got signed papers to prove it. It was arsenic.”

Sergeant Trotter’s parade-ground voice, though muted, was still cold and carrying to a degree. “Then why don’t the police know?” he said.

“Because Sir Bartholomew asked Beltanno not to tell them,” said Johnson; and they all turned again and looked at me.

A large number of well-adjusted persons go through life ignorant as a cabbage of their own likely reactions in sudden emergency. Mine are not only within my awareness; they are timed and graded according to the emergency. This I would rate as an acute abdomen. I thought with commensurate speed.

I said, “I did take tests, that’s true. Sir Bartholomew was given a dose of arsenic both times, by whom I don’t know. I need hardly say” — I looked at Johnson — “if the police get to hear that I’ve concealed the fact, it’ll be the end of my career.”

“We won’t tell them,” said Johnson soothingly. “Thelma, you can vouch for everyone here? We don’t want Beltanno in trouble.”

“Speak for yourself,” said James Ulric suddenly. My dear, doting old father. “But why didn’t Edgecombe want the police told? And why did Florence Nightingale here agree not to tell them?”

“Tell them,” said Johnson through the haze of his pipe. “You won’t believe this, Thelma, and I’ll thank you to remember it the next time you accuse me of boring you, although I must remember in future not to raise these matters just before meals. Beltanno, tell them what Bart said that his job was.”

It was like double talk in the operating theater when the patient is only partly anaesthetized. I kicked the Spoonmakers’ Union mentally in the teeth and gave my answer, right or wrong, but bang on the cue. “He said he was a member of the British Intelligence service,” I said. “He persuaded me, too.”

Like a handsome doll in her robes, the Begum was staring at me. “You’re making it all up. Johnson, what are you teaching this girl?”

“Listen,” said Johnson. “No one has anything to teach Doctor B. Douglas MacRannoch. She believed Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe, and I believe her. And what’s more, I’m keeping my mouth shut about it. If the espionage network is gunning for Bart, then the counterespionage network can get on with gunning right back without help from us.”

Four people said, “But—” and I swear you could hear their ectopic cardiac beats chiming like clocks.

My father said, “In that case he’s not coming here. Thelma, I forbid you to invite Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe here. Johnson here was once nearly killed in mistake for that man, and his wife
has
been killed. Which of us might be next?”

“Really, James,” said the Begum with interest. “You mean you think the killer is here?”

My father is not one to boggle. “If he isn’t here, he could get here without blowing his mind. How many people are coming from Nassau for this beach barbecue next week?”

“Seventy-five,” the Begum said serenely. “Most of them MacRannochs, darling.”

Krishtof Bey, his face solemn, shook his head slowly. “This is bad. Even registered breeds have their deviants.”

I despised them all, and especially Johnson. I said icily, “I cannot imagine that Sir Bartholomew returning from his wife’s funeral will wish to attend a beach barbecue. May I invite Mr. Tiko?”

My father shouting “No!” clashed with the Begum answering “Yes.” She went on firmly: “Of course Sir Bartholomew need not come to the barbecue unless he wishes. But I will not throw this poor man to his attackers. He will stay safely here on my island as long as he wishes. And so far as the Asiatic forty-sixth chief of the MacRannochs is concerned, the answer is equally simple. Beltanno will tell you. The quickest way to make anyone immunologically competent is to expose them freely to the disease.”

It was a layman’s imprecise grasp of a precise physical law, but I overlooked it. If I was an emotional midget, the fault was my father’s, tramping through all my nascent relationships to visit his traplines. This time I was setting my own gun with the Begum’s assistance, and James Ulric wasn’t going to keep Mr. Tiko away. I wanted to see Mr. Tiko’s face when he found out I was the MacRannoch’s sole daughter. If I lived long enough, that is to say.

The lunch gong sounded as the Begum’s butler was handing around drinks and everyone was in the midst of exclaiming and speculating about Edgecombe’s precise function in the unbelievable and slightly ridiculous world of espionage. During all the boring repetition of events at the airport, at the club, and elsewhere, it was remarkable how earnest was the conversation and thoughtful were the theories of the three men most closely implicated: Brady, Trotter, and the dancer.

Since the Begum’s fantasy had turned into cold fact, no one had had the bad taste to refer to the favored position of these three in the list of suspects. No one either appeared to notice that Johnson had done the very thing he had warned me against in Nassau. He had warned the murderer, if the murderer were one of these three, that I alone had the physical proof that Bart Edgecombe had been poisoned.

My irritation with James Ulric evaporated. Even my plans for Mr. Tiko began to appear somewhat flat. If anyone in this house was laying traps, it was Johnson Johnson. And the lure, 126 pounds deadweight, was me.

I REMEMBER VERY LITTLE of that lunch, except that during it I decided to apply for a Heinz Fellowship in Zambia. After coffee the Begum announced that the immediate hours of heat were to be spent, by order, in siesta and that we should foregather later by the swimming pool. Having tried to catch Johnson’s eye yet again and been repulsed by those despicable bifocals, I walked upstairs to my room and locked myself in.

I took off my dress and lay on the bed. Without slip and girdle, I had to admit, my pores functioned more freely. There was a pink patch, from the second rib down to the navel, where Paul’s oiling yesterday had ameliorated the effect of the sun. Above my head a fan moved like an aircraft propeller, stirring my wig and rustling the long blossoming stems in a Chinese vase in the corner, across an unthinkable expanse of white, fitted bearskin. The air conditioner hummed.

It was peaceful, as under a hair dryer. In long cedar cupboards, my new clothes hung out of sight. Beside me on a low table were a Chinese lamp, some new books in glossy dustjackets, cigarettes, a lighter and ash tray, and a vacuum flask of iced water. No telephone. No telephones on the Out Islands of the Bahamas. No telephones or radio transmitters on Crab.

The branches stirred, pale pink against the taffeta of the drawn curtains. A frivolous dusk enfolded the room. It was the same shape as my room in Castle Rannoch, but my room at home had no cedar wardrobes and only one deep-set window, looking onto the sea. The cold sea and the rain. I closed my eyes.

No fitted carpet either. My room in Castle Rannoch had a gray stone-flagged floor, with an old and valuable rug. One of the first tests of a candidate had been his response to that rug. The boy who had taken me home from the Oban Gathering had offered to get an uncle to mend it. Last seen of that boy. Last seen of any boy worth a damn.

I opened my unwilling eyes. The curtain billowed. This room is just like my room in Castle Rannoch except that everything in it is in perfect condition, save for B. Douglas MacRannoch.

Query: What did I have to drink at lunch?

Answer: Tomato juice.

Addendum: Krishtof Bey was at table beside me.

My room at Castle Rannoch connects with a dressing room used as a bedroom by my succession of nurses. At Castle Rannoch the doorway would be behind that pink curtain.

The pink curtain billowed.

Even when on automatic pilot, my reactions, I am happy to say, are faster than most people’s. I snatched the gun from my pillow before the silk had dropped into place and fired one, two, three times. Three neat holes appeared in the pink. The stacked branches of blossom dropped like corpses, rigid to one side of the vase. And the vase itself began moving slowly toward me.

I raised the gun, and someone beside me plucked it neatly out of my hand.

“Stop,” said Krishtof Bey. “It is Tang, and the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would ill-wish your next elective abortion.”

I sat there in my underpants and brassiere while the rest of him came out from under the bed. He had my gun in one hand, and a long lasso haltering the Chinese vase in the other. He was still wearing the gold necklace and the pair of green cotton beach pants. He said, “Dear Doctor MacRannoch. My iman says my fate is not to be shot. I thought you might have a gun.”

I will not pretend to be calm. A mentally subnormal patient subject to hypomanic attacks is good humored, requires little sleep, and is always complaining of hunger. With my larded midriff maintained as upright as the bedding made possible, I said with gentle authority, “I never shoot a man who is sick, Krishtof Bey. I try to help him. Would you like a biscuit?”

The Tartar face tilted and shook slowly in thought. “I hadn’t thought of it. Have you got a biscuit?” he said.

I smiled warmly. “In the pocket of my coat. Over there, you see, with my dresses.”

The gun did not waver, but I had puzzled him. “Do you always carry biscuits about in your pockets?” he said.

Vodka, I thought. An alcoholic with an acute anxiety neurosis may break at any moment into psychotic episodes. “I get hungry,” I said. “In the other pocket you’ll find a flask of Scotch whiskey.”

He lay on the bearskin regarding me, his elbow holding the pistol resting quietly on the edge of my bed, and the ends of his hair stirred on his shoulders as he shook his head yet again. A trace of anxiety appeared and vanished. He had, as they all do, a strong streak of cunning. Even his voice had become soft and gentle. “Try to relax,” he said. “Forget the gun. Just lie back, Doctor MacRannoch, and I will bring to you the whiskey flask and also the biscuits. Close your eyes.”

It wasn’t quite what I meant, but it would do. My distress score rating — 0 for calm and 100 for panic — dropped to around 25 and oscillated at the ready. I closed my eyes and he got up from the bearskin and moved over to the sliding doors of the wardrobe.

I made a single athletic bound for the door.

Krishtof Bey made the kind of leap I am told Nijinsky performed as a large Hybrid Tea, and hooking my ankle, brought me down on my brassiere
thud
on the white bearskin carpet. He then flipped me over and with three turns of his lasso, bound my wrists together before me.

I was not inactive. I have felled a full-scale chromosomal aberration before now; I have brought a six-foot YY syndrome to his knees. But never before had I fought a Turkish ballet dancer in full command of his unsuppressed senses. When I found myself at length, hands bound and flat on the carpet, I felt like a foam-rubber prototype in an ergonomics laboratory. Krishtof Bey, his respiration barely stirring his necklace, tossed the gun in the air, caught it, laid it on a table and said, “Were you hoping I was a nice, easy manic depressive? I’m not. I just wanted to ask you, Doctor B. Douglas MacRannoch, about that arsenic poisoning.” And he sat on my feet before I could kick him and added sweetly, “And I dare you to scream.”

It wasn’t rate 100 yet; but it wasn’t too far away from the 90s, at that. The oblique, cynical eyes smiled down at me. All right. He didn’t have the gun. But with muscles like those and speed like that he could choke the life out of me long before any scream of mine could be heard beyond those thick walls. And I knew just how thick those walls were. I cleared my throat. I said, “Tell me how you did it.”

I hadn’t expected him really to talk, and he didn’t. He smiled. “Tell me what happened to the results of those arsenic tests. Did you write them down?”

“Yes,” I said. A sound idea had just occurred to me.

“And where are they?” said Krishtof Bey. His voice was over-friendly and feline.

“Johnson Johnson has them,” I said. “And if you kill me, he’ll hand them straight to the police.”

“Exposing Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe as an agent?” asked Krishtof Bey. Reclining picturesquely beside me, he was stroking the area of my lower diaphragm with a speculative finger. “Poor darling.”

He was not referring to Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe. My skin twitched. I said, “Of course. Well, the murderer at least must already know he’s an agent.”

“Suppressive therapy,” said Krishtof Bey thoughtfully. “Against men. Did you take a course, Beltanno? What did they do, inject a nausea response to after-shave lotion?” He picked up my tied wrists, damn him, and impudently felt my pulse. “Then why haven’t you or Johnson told the police already?” he said.

I quelled a strong impulse to tremble, and tried to concentrate my intellectual powers. If I didn’t watch, I was going to blow Johnson’s precious cover, as the jargon regrettably went. I wasn’t at all sure whether I cared. I said: “Johnson didn’t want trouble. And it was just possible that this was a personal feud against Edgecombe. But if anything happens to me, even Johnson won’t hesitate. I promise you that.”

He grinned. He was still holding my pulse. I said, “Why do you want to kill Edgecombe? Was Johnson right? Does he know something about you?”

Krishtof Bey rose to his feet like a milk-pouring commercial run backward and struck the fifth position, brown arms outflung. He relaxed, and gazed down his torso at me. “Everyone knows about dancers,” he said. “Am I not a magnificent animal?”

“So are laboratory chimpanzees,” I said. “And you should see
their
psychoses.”

He bounced lightly and lay on the bed, looking at me. “In Izmir at this moment two secretaries are answering my love mail. Letters from ballet-sick ladies all over the world, with their photographs, Beltanno. In Copenhagen, where I am dancing next month, they will put up the crash barriers and give me a police escort from the house of my host to the theater. In my diary I have invitations from multimillionairesses, from film stars, from royalty. Today, in a hundred places in the world, someone is saying, ‘Where is Krishtof Bey? What is he doing? Will he come to my costume ball? Will he agree to dance in our opera house? Will he come and make love to me if I send him a diamond link-belt, or maybe a Cadillac?’ ”

His dangling arm drifted down to my thigh and I watched it, my calf muscles bunched. He withdrew it snappishly. “Beltanno,
will you relax
?”

“How can I?” I spat back at him. “Until I find out whether you’re going to kill me or rape me?”

“Oh,” he said. A charming smile spread over that conceited, deceitful, gorgeous Tartar face. Slow as a crêpe-de-chine scarf, he began to slide over the edge of the bed, paused, smiled, and landed with a thud on my struggling body. He kissed me.

“Beltanno darling, I’m not going to kill you,” he murmured.

In all my medical reading I have found no clinical description of the kiss which he then pressed upon me. I stopped struggling. After four minutes the kiss moved down my neck and lingered here and there around my clavicles.

In fact I had closed my eyes when I became aware that Krishtof Bey had detached himself and was sitting back on his heels, viewing me thoughtfully. “Don’t let’s rush it,” he said. “There’s no hurry.”

There was something wrong with my attention span. After a long time I said, “Don’t rush what?” I was still lying on the floor. It was very comfortable.

Krishtof Bey rose to his feet, floated around to my bedside table, and poured out two glasses of iced water. He put one on the bearskin beside me and untied my wrists. “To counteract the vodka,” he said. “It is true. I could not believe it: you have never been kissed before? A nice woman doctor like you? Not even in
medical school
?”

I was dissecting male Blumer’s shelves while the others were kissing in medical school. In my year there was one Sohrab, five Abduls, and sixteen Mohammeds, but no Krishtof Bey. He brought across the white bathrobe, which was all I had for a dressing gown, and I put it on and drank my iced water, sitting in a deep furry chair. I was still fairly comatose, although I wondered why he had stopped kissing me. I even wondered, I believe, if I had done something wrong.

The word
vodka
was borne in by some kind of slow-release capsule. I said vaguely accusing, “You did put the vodka into my tomato juice?”

“Begum’s orders,” said the Magnificent Animal succinctly. He vanished for a moment behind the pink slubbed silk curtain and reappeared with a tape recorder slung from his fingers. It didn’t even occur to me to get up from my chair. I frowned.

“
Begum
’s orders?”

“Yes. Don’t ask me why.” He was fiddling with the tape recorder, which gave out a long passage of chirrups. Then he got what he wanted and looked up with that slow, catlike smile. “You didn’t really think I was going to kill you?”

“You tied my hands,” I said. I drank some more iced water. I do not know what was the matter with me.

“True. It is the first time I have had to immobilize a woman before I have kissed her,” said Krishtof. “On the other hand, it is the first time also she has tried to shoot me.” The tape recorder, at full volume, had burst into a ninety-piece orchestral rendering of the Breadcrumb Fairy variation from
The Sleeping Princess
, and he rose on the points of his slippers and did a few desultory steps while he was talking. It was very confusing.

Despite it, however, I was coming to myself. I said, “Why did you hide in my room? You wanted to know what I had done with the arsenic tests. You didn’t want to kiss me. You wanted to find out how much I knew.”

“I wanted to find out how much you knew about kissing,” he said. He stopped and wreathed my face with his hand in the ballet symbol for affection, as explained in the Covent Garden programs. He moved off, crossing his knees in an unlikely manner. “It was a joke, my dear Doctor MacRannoch. So correct. So unapproachable. How to kiss you? It was easy. I make you drunk, and I make you frightened.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

He turned and
bourréed
back over the bearskin, ending in a charming half hitch. “You don’t believe me because you have no confidence in yourself,” he said. “You are very kissable, Doctor. You have a body that might be a dancer’s, a little ruined by golf, but one could soon set that right. You have strength and precision… Listen, does the music not move you?”

If it didn’t move me, I thought, the walls were shortly going to fall out backward. It had moved on to the Polovtsian Dances from
Prince Igor
, who could obviously afford a larger orchestra than the Breadcrumb Fairy. The ice-water glasses were chattering and the fan over my bed started to stagger. “Come!” said the Magnificent Animal, and pulled me onto my feet.

I am not, as I have reported, a dancer. Neither am I a Hungarian acrobat. As I went over Krishtof Bey’s shoulder and under his arm in a type of cloverleaf system, I had time to thank God for the bearskin. Whatever happened to my wig or my intervertebral discs, I should fall soft.

In the end, I pinned down the technique. Dancing consists of a number of simple binary decision points: whether to stand up or fall down. As we emerged from a back-to-back spin, I would begin to fall down, and Krishtof would raise me with a hand under one thigh and throw me onto his shoulder. I would begin to fall down again, and he would catch me and switch me like full dairy cream by my own upraised arm, while I stood up. He would then plié around about me until I fell down again.