Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (26 page)

All this I could see, barely raising my head beyond the rear wheel of the car. On my left I saw the dark shape of Johnson, and behind him a black sea of scrubland stretching between the beach and the road as far as the eye could distinguish. Far in the distance were the prick lights of the small airport tower. The sea hissed and rumbled and the wind blew lightly southeast, from the airport, and carried all sound away.

The fugitives would arrive from the right, along the long beachside fairways. They would run through the scrub. I wondered whether they would choose the rough ground by the sea, where the waves would drown their footsteps but might also deaden their hearing. Or the low jungle between the fairways and the road, pitted with cuttings and the half-built foundations of villas, good for an ambush or merely a broken ankle for the unwary. Unlike Johnson and myself, they couldn’t take the open, straight road. Theirs, creeping, ducking, silently moving from bush to bush and cover to cover, would take so much longer.

There was no sound now but the sea. The last burst of firing had been some time ago, far over by the blockade. The escaping men had thrown off their pursuers, or had been allowed to believe that they had. Johnson had said that Edgecombe was heading them off. If so, there was no sign of him yet. I wondered if he was lying out there, somewhere under the scented black bushes, with his gun trained on the fairway, waiting for the moment when Trotter and Brady broke cover and made their run for the car.

He had believed Johnson was dead; I had seen it in his face. Nor would I forget the passion of rage in which he had leveled his gun and pulled the trigger on the snarling, swerving figure of Trotter, the smoking gun still in his hand. And now, suddenly, the hunter was the hunted. Trotter had no time to seek out and kill Edgecombe now. If he wanted to escape with his life, he had to reach this car and that boat.

Silence. I wondered what Johnson was thinking. And if Judith Cicely Ballantyne was waiting to welcome him home. The men in the lee of the car lay without speaking. The surf buzzed, and a new wave began to echo along its incoming length and broke and buzzed in its turn, leaving another silence, long and indrawn like a breath.

A long, warbling scream burst upon it, undulating over the fairways, throbbing through the dense, grassy distances far on the right. Johnson’s hand, reaching suddenly from behind, pulled me hard and quickly away from the end of the car. I rolled and lay still as the cry came again. Then wriggling out of his grasp, I gripped the sides of the car and raised my head over the side panel to look.

Bucking out of the dangerous darkness — erect, gallant, befringed, and straight out of Schwartz’s side window — came one of the Tamboo Club golf carts, a flutter of pink silk in the driving seat, a full-blooded Islamic war cry emerging from under the canopy. Krishtof Bey was quartering the ground between fairway and road at a high cruising speed, roaring joyous defiance as he did so.

At the same moment, on the other side of the fairway, a second cart jolted out of the darkness and proceeded to scan the rough by the seaside, slowing now and then and picking up speed, but all the time coming steadily nearer. Dimly, as it approached, I glimpsed within it Bartholomew Edgecombe’s gray mane of hair. Johnson, kneeling beside me, began to laugh and then had to stifle it. “My God. The beaters,” he said under his breath.

He had just spoken when there was a crack from Krishtof Bey’s rifle and a man jumped from the palmetto far on our left, stopped, hesitated, and then turned and ran straight toward us, along the broad open fairway. There was a second shot from Krishtof Bey’s; then his cart jerked and began jogging toward us. The runner looked around then, and quickened his pace. As he got nearer, the blur of pale hands and face resolved themselves into familiar features.

“Trotter,” said Johnson in a murmur. His hand was down, signaling us all to be still. No one moved. His other hand was tight on his gun.

Then I saw Johnson’s fist relax and realized that Edgecombe had seen what was happening. Swerving out from the bush-covered dunes, he had set the cart over the fairway, edging the dark, running figure between Krishtof and himself. And as Trotter sensed it and looked around, a red flash of gunfire from Edgecombe’s cart splintered the darkness.

Trotter didn’t fire back. He ran until we could hear the squeak of his footsteps and the sawing sound of his breath. Johnson let him come. He let him run up to the car on the opposite side of which we were all lying. He let him lay hands on the door handle as Edgecombe’s golf cart, cutting in front of its fellow, came to a dead halt.

Trotter had already snatched the door handle open when the silence warned him the cart had stopped moving. He let it go and flung himself on the ground, gun in hand, as Edgecombe knelt by the steering wheel and fired at him, again and again.

He missed him. I heard the bullets ring on the side of the car and the rustle as Trotter rolled off and got to his knees. Beside me, Johnson suddenly rose to his feet and stood, madly, in full view behind the low, open car.

Kneeling where he was, Trotter couldn’t possibly see him. But Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe did. He half rose from where he was crouching, his eyes on Johnson: a vision, a man from the dead, and for a moment in his amazement, forgot even the gun in his hand.

It was not a mistake that Trotter, the sergeant-major would make. Edgecombe rose before him, the perfect target; and from where I sprawled by the rear of the car I saw Trotter’s hand raise the gun.

I still think I could have stopped him. I know that I put all the strength that I had behind the spring that would take me around the car and drag his gun arm away as he fired.

Johnson prevented me. He flung me sideways with a sudden, swift violence that deprived me of breath, and then pinned me there, gasping and helpless, by the rear wheel of the car.

And so Trotter raised his gun unimpeded, and fired; and a black hole sprang like a coin between Edgecombe’s eyes before he fell slowly sideways and dead, onto the perfectly mown grass.

Johnson pulled me away from the car just as Trotter vaulted into the seat and turned on the ignition. He looked around as he put her into gear; I think he saw us all behind him. He must have known the road would be ambushed, the boat gone. But he was an obstinate man. He put off the brake and shot forward just as Johnson, aiming deliberately, shot him twice through the head. The car crossed the road under its own momentum, hit the verge, and turned over twice. It lay several seconds, wheels spinning, before the explosion burst it apart and the fire rosily flickering, revealed us all to each other. We looked rosy, too, in the bright jolly firelight. Tiny Tim and hot chestnuts and Christmas. Flameproof your nightwear. Flameproof your relationships. No one is ever what he seems.

Krishtof Bey jumped down from his golf cart and Wallace Brady, carrying Krishtof’s rifle, stepped out from the passenger seat of the same cart and bent over the dead body of Edgecombe. I watched them without understanding and almost without interest. Cars drew up and all the persons who had been waiting inert about us had suddenly become very busy. A water cart arrived and someone began to play hoses on the half-consumed car. I wondered if it was the boy in the red shirt and the fancy straw hat. I could no longer hear the sound of the sea.

A large, closed Buick slid up beside me and Johnson, emerging from a talking cluster of men, took my arm and said, “Get in, Beltanno. Spry will take you to
Dolly
and it won’t be long before you’re safe on Crab Island with James Ulric and the Begum. I’ll be there as soon as I can get away.” He looked at me, and then said, “Wait a bit.”

He had a flask of whiskey — what else — in his pocket. I watched him pour it and took the cup, remembering the three stiff ones he had poured in Bart Edgecombe’s house, and why. I drank it, and he took the cup back. “Good girl. Explanations later,” said Johnson. “But you were a magnificent doctor bird. The undoubted backbone or vertebrae column of the whole bloody exercise.”

I didn’t say anything. I saw Wallace Brady look over, but I didn’t want to say anything to him either. I got into the car and sat stiffly in it as Spry drove me away from the noise and the light into the warm, airy darkness. A faint hissing came to my ears: the sea, clouded by the night spray of all the myriads of sprinklers, grooming the greens for the next championship match. Who had won? Mr. Tiko, perhaps. No one else.

It wasn’t until the car stopped moving that I realized we were at the quay where
Dolly
’s speedboat was lying. The Begum and James Ulric were already on Crab Island, he said. Mr. Tiko would be there soon, I supposed. And Krishtof and Wallace Brady. Or were they part of the plot too? Were even Johnson and
Dolly
what they seemed? Did anyone know?

Or perhaps they all knew, except me. The backbone of the whole scheme, he had called me. The dupe. The laughing stock, the bartered bride, the cropped dummy, the fall guy.

Spry was holding open the door.

I said, “No. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to go to Crab Island. I want to go straight back to Nassau. There must be plenty of planes leaving with all this upheaval. Do you think you could take me instead to the airport?”

I thought he would stall me, or try to make some objection, but he didn’t. He took me straight to the airport, and I was in a plane and heading for Nassau inside of an hour.

Even from the air you could see it all: the criss-crossing lights of the cars, and the ruddy, spiraling light and smoke from the dying bonfire of Trotter’s wrecked car. Then the little plane heeled around and flew off, leaving Great Harbour Cay and its golf course lying behind on the dark sea.

I HAD TO WORK a month’s notice in the United Commonwealth Hospital, and no one bothered me during that time, although I had two calls from James Ulric asking me if I was all right, and Mr. Tiko rang once to say that he had been called back to New York but wished me to know that he would be happy to accede to whatever plans I wished to make for the future. I thanked him, and said that I would write to him presently. I found I was glad, if surprised, that Johnson hadn’t killed him as well. He wrote back that perhaps he would meet me at the MacRannoch Gathering.

Perhaps.

I worked very hard at my job. Perhaps a holiday was what I had needed. Or perhaps it was energy released by the act of resignation. It had pleased my father, even when I informed him that in future I proposed to draw on our joint account. He had never wanted me to work. He had only wanted me to become married. And so I might have, if I had never met Johnson.

I didn’t ask him about the outcome on Great Harbour Cay, and there was nothing of moment in the
Nassau Guardian
, only the heading
edgecombe rites monday
and a large respectful obituary on Sir Bartholomew, fatally wounded while grappling with an army deserter in his Great Harbour Cay garden. There was a brief recapitulation of Lady Edgecombe’s recent tragic demise. I read them both sketchily and stopped thinking about it again.

I took a weekend trip to New York and bought some clothes and went to the theater and had a large Bossa Nova in the interval, which was a mistake, as it made me think of Miami all over again. Next day I wore my dark glasses in hospital, but no one commented adversely.

I had never found the hospital atmosphere so clear and so pleasant as it had been this last month. Perhaps because they knew I was leaving. Perhaps because of my wig? My C.M.O. took me out to lunch and unfolded two risqué jokes and a long account of how he had always wanted to be a veterinary surgeon while I had two Yellowberries without noticeable effect. I was getting used to them. I was getting used to everything except being utilized and being ignored.

My father rang up for the third time and said the Begum wanted to know if she could get married, and I said, “Ask Johnson.” He said Johnson had gone away, and what was it to do with him anyway? It was too complicated to explain, so I rang off.

I got home two days later, operating day, to be met by Daffodil at the door, and the smell of pipe smoke curling around from the hallway. A gentleman had stopped in to see me. “A Mr. —”

“I know,” I said. “Good evening, Mr. Johnson.”

He was standing in my father’s sitting room in a crumpled shirt and tie, evidently put on in my honor, and a serious look around the bifocals, saying nothing at all. I uttered a few commonplace bromides while Daffodil closed the door and walked with reluctance away from the keyhole. Johnson said, “I apologize for coming along uninvited, but I knew you wouldn’t see me if I telephoned. The Begum tells me I have made an impression mid-way between Mussolini and a Chubb TDR safe. I am here to adjust my image. You weren’t expected to suffer all that without a word of decent explanation.”

“I know,” I said. “I got the dose without the antidepression pill. It was my own fault for leaving so quickly.” I didn’t ask him to sit down.

“You were seen,” said Johnson gravely, “drinking Yellowberries. But if you don’t want to listen, I’m not going to pressure you. The other reason I came was to carry out a commission.” He glanced at the wall. “I’ve been asked to leave you a painting.”

I walked two steps in and looked where he nodded. A square artist’s canvas, unframed, had been propped between the floor and the wall. Out of it, cheerful and enigmatic, gazed the dark face of Krishtof Bey, his hands clasped below at his knees.

“With the sitter’s compliments,” Johnson said. “I was also to convey to you Wallace Brady’s competitive love, and James Ulric wants to know if you’ve married that little buff wop yet.”

“Nip,” I said automatically. I stared from Johnson’s bifocals to Krishtof Bey’s large painted eyes with their shameless false lashes. There was no doubt at all. He was a fiendishly good painter. I said, “You
are
a bloody Mussolini.”

“It’s a lie,” he said calmly.

“I ought to turn you out. I don’t want any more dirt on my hands. I don’t want to hear —”

“You do,” said Johnson. “You want to know why Wallace Brady isn’t in prison and you want to know if Krishtof Bey is married or not.”

“He isn’t,” I said. “I looked him up in
Who’s Who
.”

There was an attentive movement of the bifocals. “You don’t mean the Begum’s folio edition?” Johnson said. “You should try an up-to-date one. You’ve missed half his love life. I don’t suppose it said a word about my six children.”

“No,” I said. “But it mentioned Judith Cicely Ballantyne.”

The bifocals remained completely impassive. “The daughter,” he said, “of perhaps the most famous Russian spy the world has ever known, Igor Vasily Balinski. She married me on Kremlin orders to extirpate all my secrets, and when the truth came out later, we shot each other. They gave her a Soviet state funeral. Her aim had always been poor.”

We stared at one another, on the heels of this farrago. Whatever other precepts I had hurled out of the window, I could still respect privacy. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Sit down. What will you drink?”

He remained standing. He said thoughtfully, “Why should you suppose that it had any truth in it?”

Ever since I had met him here in this house, the night he had taken me sailing on
Dolly
, he had been deceiving me. He must have been. Hardly anything he told me during all those subsequent days had been truthful. Why then should I believe that his wife was dead, and that he had loved her? He wanted me to listen, and sympathetically. He had made sure that I would.

I thought about it, standing there with the cap of the Haig bottle unscrewed in my hand. It wasn’t hard, once I did think about it. “I believed you,” I said, “because I watched you shoot those two men on the golf course.”

He said, “I only shot one.”

“No,” I said. “You took Edgecombe’s life. It only happened to be Trotter who fired the bullet that killed him.”

Johnson moved. He removed the cap from my fingers and taking up the bottle of whiskey, he set out two glasses and poured. “If you will allow me,” he said. The lower lenses perched, two bald Chads, on the edge of his glass as he lifted it, unsmiling, to toast me. He said, “To the Scottish teaching hospitals and all they produce.”

I let him drink, and sit down, and put his whiskey on the table beside him before I asked the question I had forbidden myself until now even to think about. “All the time,” I said, “from the beginning, that day in the airport — who was trying to kill Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe?”

I thought I was ready for anything. I thought no answer he could give would surprise me. Instead he said, “You’ve had a month of worry, haven’t you, Beltanno? That was what I had been hoping to save you. You see, no one was trying to kill Bartholomew Edgecombe. You were only intended to believe someone was.”

“Play acting?” I said helpfully. I wondered if he expected me to believe him this time as well. I said, “The arsenic at the airport? The further dose on the plane? Pentecost’s attempt at the Bamboo Conch Club? The attempts to warn me off there and in New York and at Coral Harbour? The attack on me at Miami and the disappearance of your luggage and mine before my notes vanished on Crab Island? Denise’s death? The attempt to blow up Edgecombe on
Dolly
? The grenade someone threw at his car here that night? No one was trying to kill Bart Edgecombe, were they?” I said with some forgivable sarcasm. “Except that someone did kill him, and you did nothing at all to prevent him.”

“We had an industrious week or two, didn’t we?” said Johnson, his eyebrows raised, his glasses filled with mild contemplation. “You and I and the Mighty Leveler, raking together a scratch-and-dent sale. Of course I did nothing to stop Bart Edgecombe’s murder that evening. I’d just spent twenty-four hours organizing the whole bloody opera. I couldn’t kill Edgecombe myself; the Royal Academy wouldn’t be happy. Trotter had to do it.”

“He hated both you and Edgecombe,” I said slowly. “Trotter’s plan misfired at the Bamboo Conch Club, but he made sure you wouldn’t catch that waiter, or that if you did, the waiter wouldn’t live to confess. He could have caused all the disasters on
Dolly
, expecting to make some excuse to disembark before
Haven
struck her. He saved our lives, but only because he had to save his own. And on the golf course that night, you fell to his bullet.”

You’ve killed him
, Edgecombe had shouted at Trotter.
You bloody traitor, you’ve killed Johnson instead
.

“I dare say you thought so,” said Johnson mildly. “It looked like it from every angle but mine. Trotter aimed into the bushes where we both were, but he was actually shooting at Edgecombe. And Edgecombe, who was expecting it, was tough and quick and above all, a splendid opportunist. He ducked when he saw Trotter lift his revolver and turning, took his own sights. When Trotter fired, Edgecombe fired as well. Of course he thought I was dead. He had just shot me himself, as I looked at him, full in the chest.”

God bless the drip-dry titanium underwear. I said, “He might have chosen your head.”

Johnson said, “I tried not to give him the chance. But it was a risk that had to be taken.”

I knew my voice had gone flat. I said, “You expected Sir Bartholomew sometime to turn on you? Your own colleague and agent?”

He smiled a little, nursing his whiskey, but his glasses were bleak as the North Sea in the deepening dusk. He said, “Edgecombe and I were on opposite sides from the moment I landed in Nassau. He was a double agent, Beltanno: a man being paid by and cheating both sides. We suspected it, but his other employers had found out for certain. They offered him his life on one condition only: that in return he delivered them mine.”

“He was to kill you?” I said. I could not conceive of it. The big, gray-haired pleasant man lying sick in my own private ward.

“He was to kill me. And because he was anxious that on no account should our people ever suspect him, he made an elaborate plan. The attacks were to appear directed at him. The outside world was to believe them accidental; we should gradually come to perceive that it was a personal grudge. And to make sure that we knew, he picked you, Beltanno.”

“Picked me?” I said.

“He had seen you at the hospital, remember? And been impressed by your efficiency. A forthright and independent young woman, who would have her own views about a sudden attack of food poisoning, and would be likely to act on them. He was in New York, Beltanno, because you were going to be in New York; and Trotter was there as his assistant.”

“And Wallace Brady?” I asked. I wouldn’t have gone so far if he hadn’t mentioned him already.

“Wallace Brady,” said Johnson with evident enjoyment, “is an innocent bystander who likes building bridges and doesn’t think young women are to be trusted with guns in their handbags. He and Krishtof did sterling work in the last lap, driving both Trotter and Edgecombe toward the car and into our hands.”

For a moment, it had appeared to make sense. I said snappishly, “But
Trotter
shot
Edgecombe
.”

“I should think so,” said Johnson. “After all, Edgecombe had just arranged his own accident and got safely off
Dolly
without returning as promised to take Trotter off too. I must confess that even if Edgecombe had wanted to come back on board, I had asked Brady not to allow him. A dependable young man, I thought him. All that stuff with the reverse gears.”

I said, “Then you knew already that Edgecombe and Trotter were working together?”

He had known. I closed the screens and switched on the lamps as he gave me, encapsuled in that cool voice, the true events of that series of days which had ended my medical life.

To begin with, Edgecombe’s reports were already troubling his masters. Slight omissions, slight inaccuracies had led to Johnson’s presence in this part of the world, planned for two months to appear to coincide with an exhibition in Miami: a fortuitous visit which would allow him to call on Edgecombe in passing and judge for himself what was happening.

When news of Edgecombe’s illness had reached him, brought by me, he had at once felt uneasy. It was no place of Edgecombe’s to appoint an intermediary, however innocent. With the news he had to tell, he himself should have contacted
Dolly
immediately.

But of course, said Johnson, Edgecombe had chosen me with a purpose. I had to authenticate the attack. I was there to prove that he really had been poisoned, and once one realized that, one also realized that my life throughout would be sacrosanct.

The telephoned threat to me he had also found curious, and the odd repetition of words at the nightclub and at Coral Harbour. Where I might have reported my findings direct to the hospital or the police, the threats had led me at least to talk to Sir Bartholomew, and had given him a chance to take me into his confidence. They had also given further proof, which I could later vouch for, that Sir Bartholomew’s life was indeed under attack.

But these had only been vague suspicions until the fire at the Bamboo Conch Club. Then the coincidences, said Johnson, became oddly marked. The club had been Lady Edgecombe’s choice, on her husband’s recommendation. A suitcase of clothes had been stolen, resulting in Johnson’s wearing an outfit of Edgecombe’s. Whether the ensuing fire resulted in death or in injury, the claim could be made that the attack had been intended for Edgecombe.

“But how odd, I thought,” said Johnson pensively, “that the attack had been prepared, and by a resident waiter. What would have happened if Lady Edgecombe had chosen to go to Charley Charley’s? It seemed to me that whoever made that choice of club also knew what was likely to happen there. And after the waiter died, I was also prepared to believe that Sergeant Trotter knew more than he should. At that point,” went on Johnson’s quiet voice, “it seemed quite likely that the assault was intended for me, and that the culprit might be Lady Edgecombe. For example, any man whose family lived on Great Harbour Cay would surely know Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe’s family by sight.”