Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (22 page)

The swimmer was just ahead of the
Haven
. Trotter lifted a hand, raising himself out of the water, and Spry allowed to spin loose all the remaining free cable. We watched the spray settle. Trotter’s head came up, cropped in the sunlight, and his hands flashed as he gathered the rope. For ten seconds maybe, he waited: the small tough sergeant-major, his brown shoulders washed by the blue surging sea, watching the approaching white boat with its sheer sides and its empty wheel and its well filled with explosives.

Lifting himself like a seal from the waves, Rodney Trotter drew back the arm with the cable, and threw. The rope hissed through the air, dropping a string of white water; a sparkle of spray left the grapple. We saw the iron hit the coaming of
Haven
’s white starboard bow, hesitate, and then drop down inside out of sight.

The rope tightened. As the launch swerved unevenly past him, it drew Trotter swinging out of the sea, hands working, one strong foot already finding a purchase. By sheer momentum he got two-thirds up her sides before
Haven
forced past him, swinging the rope to her stern and unsettling the grip of the grappling iron. The rope came loose and he snatched instead, with both hands at
Haven
’s top side.

He caught it, and with the same movement, vaulted onto her deck like a gymnast.

Johnson stayed only to see Trotter board the
Haven
. Then, just as he was, he dove off
Dolly
and struck out toward the white boat and the sergeant.

Harry and Spry didn’t see him. Nor did Trotter, working fast by the square engine casing in
Haven
’s bows.
Haven
’s engine droned on, and the white water sheared at her bows. Above me a sail flapped and Spry called sharply: “Doctor! Take her about!”

I thought: we ought to stop. I should bring her into the wind. But
Haven
wasn’t stopping and the gap between us was closing, was shrinking again as it had in those first terrible moments. I brought
Dolly
around, my gaze half on our sails and half on Johnson’s head, black in the water. He had been swimming, but as I watched, he leaned back and began to tread water. There was no need to go on.
Haven
was still advancing toward him.

Then, like a pronouncement from God,
Haven
’s engine coughed once, and was silent.

I remember that the channel had narrowed, so that we were forced to sail on. Spry took the wheel and I climbed that swaying ladder of ratlines in the shrouds, but my binoculars were as often on
Haven
behind as conning the sandbanks in front. I saw Trotter rise from stopping the engine, fling over a rope, and let himself overboard to do something efficient, I hoped, to the rudder. I saw Johnson arrive and board
Haven
, using the same rope, as Trotter emerged from the water. We could hear clearly Trotter’s shout of surprise, and then the sound of their conversation, carried over the blessed, still waters. Below me, Spry and Harry had their binoculars on them also.

We saw Johnson edge around the well to the rear of the boat and come back after a brief burst of activity. He took a moment as he did so to have a look under the tarpaulin. Then he leaned out to help Trotter clamber aboard for the second time, spoke with him, and scrambling around, settled in front of the helm.

We watched, buffeted by the stillness, as if we had been prepared for an operation, and did not realize even now that the operation was not going to take place. I think that was why, when
Haven
’s engine suddenly started and that deathly roar, the roar we had throttled, came suddenly into rebirth, Harry’s nerves burst into screaming disorder. He heard the noise, and he saw those white bows begin again to move, to quicken, to drive along freely and powerfully and with ease begin to overhaul us. He dropped the mainsheet, and ran for the starboard sidedeck, as once he had been told. Then he tried to throw himself over.

Spry and I caught him and manhandled him down to the cockpit, while Johnson throttled
Haven
well down and brought her docilely behind us and then up to and past us as
Dolly
, unattended, drifted herself into the sandbar. Spry had Harry immobilized by that time, and I got out the syringe and the ampoules and immobilized him further. Then we put him into the salon.

Haven
warped
Dolly
off that sandbank; then Johnson let her float off behind, sea cocks open, while he and Trotter climbed aboard on the cable. She sank very gently in the clear, clear water among the sponges and the sea grasses and the small colored fish. I don’t think any of us felt anything: we carried our own precipitins, for the moment, against fear and danger and even relief. Besides, there was
Dolly
still to look after.

I climbed the shrouds again while Johnson took the wheel rather silently, a towel around his shoulders; and Trotter lay still and dripped on the afterdeck without doing anything at all. He deserved it. No one tried to disturb him, and very soon I saw open water and steered Johnson into it, and was allowed to come down. The sea all around us was midgreen and purple and blue. We were in deep water, and could begin to tack our way home.

I took the wheel in some of the long reaches and Spry and Johnson shared the rest. Once the sails were set on each tack, there was little to do. We took it in turns to go below into the saloon and stretch out on the cushions. Trotter recovered quickly, but Johnson slept for an hour. I left the wheel to go into the owner’s cabin to rouse him. Spry had made tea, on my advice, instead of pouring us alcohol, and I knocked and put the cup down by his side.

He grunted and opened his eyes. His hair was a mess, and he hadn’t put on his glasses since swimming, but his social adjustments as ever were effortlessly bang on the nail. He said, “I bet it’s sweet and weak, and God knows how you blackmailed Spry into producing it, but because I am suffering from fluid deprivation, I’ll drink it.” He got off the bed, his beach shirt crumpled where he had been lying on it, put on his bifocal glasses, and said: “Sit down, then, and let me look at you.”

I sat down. I was no picture. My turban had stayed somehow in place, but my sunsuit was filthy with oil and salt water and sweat, and I had larded Noxema all over the sunburn on my arms and my shoulders and nose. I stared back at Johnson as he stood leaning there drinking his tea; and to my disgust a pricking sensation made itself felt behind my puncta lacrimalia. I controlled myself and said stiffly, “We’ve missed the barbecue, I’m afraid.”

“We rather did down the National Morbidity Survey as well,” Johnson said. “Didn’t we?”

He put down his cup and, twitching a tissue out of its holder, leaned forward and wiped the surplus cream off my nose. Then he sat down beside me in the same suave and damnable silence, and putting up his two hands like a milliner, straightened the turban over my naked crop of tufted black hair. And like a child, a schoolgirl, a nurse under reprimand, I burst into tears — into, I discerned distantly some moments later, the creased bosom of Johnson’s beach shirt.

He made no remarks, but merely patted me on the back with one hand and produced a concatenation of tissues with the other until the worst of the outburst was over; and it took a long time. I can’t remember ever crying like that. I suppose I had, some time, when I was a child. Eventually I wiped my eyes for the last time and blew my nose for the last time and lifted my head and sat soggily up. “Postoperative reaction,” I said in bleary apology.

“Partly. But some post-MacRannoch reaction, I fancy, as well,” Johnson said. He got up and unlatching a locker, produced and began to pour two glasses of whiskey. He held one out to me. “To Beltanno Douglas MacRannoch, human being. Don’t marry Mr. Tiko,” he said.

I took what he gave me and drank it. “Why not?” I said. It was all very surprising, I suppose. Except that I had no emotions left to be surprised with.

“I’ve done an Eysenck personality inventory on you both,” Johnson said, and put his glass on a locker and held it. We were sailing hard, on the port tack. Someone was sober, and working. “You wouldn’t suit.”

“Whom would I suit?” I said impatiently.

Johnson took a long drink and then leaned back and took off his glasses. “In a long life, I’ve heard that said in many ways, but never grimly,” he said. “The answer, of course, is
most people
, however poorly supported by data to date. Most people, provided you let go of James Ulric MacRannoch.”

“
Let go
of my father?” I exclaimed.

“That’s what I said. You know you’re the cause of his asthma?”

Nonsense. I was rather stiff, I recall, in my answer. “My father has been hyposensitized against pollen, house dust,
Aspergillus jumigatus
, the wheat weevil, dandruff, and budgerigars. Without me, he has quite enough to be going along with.”

Johnson ignored me. “And he is the cause of your belligerent bachelor doctorhood. He said he wanted a line of baby MacRannochs. But you gave him what you thought he really wanted, didn’t you? You turned yourself into a son.”

It was a lie. It was none of his business. I would consider it later. I said, “Amateur psychiatry, Mr. Johnson?”

“And avoidance behavior, Doctor MacRannoch,” said Johnson.

We stared at one another. My whiskey, somehow, had almost got finished. “He’s going to marry the Begum,” I said.

“He would have married her years ago,” said Johnson uncompromisingly, “if he’d got you off his hands.”

“If I don’t marry Mr. Tiko… I don’t want to marry,” I said.

“You don’t need to marry. All you want are a few nice, meaningful human relationships, like Krishtof Bey. Let me recommend a well-tried and traditional therapy: people.”

“People are Harry,” I said.

“Well, Christ; you turned
him
off and disposed of the carcass.” said Johnson. “And anyway, what’s the matter with him? He had his postoperative shock before the operation, that’s all. What do you expect? A world peopled with B. Douglas MacRannochs?” He paused. “I suppose you can get it, if you opt out and go for research. We’re all the same in ash weight of bones.”

I had a splitting headache, but I wasn’t going to stand for that kind of nonsense. “Some people,” I said, “prefer pure thought to the painful vacuity of ill-considered social exchanges.”

I was rather pleased with that. Johnson sat down on the bed.

“Now you mention it,” he said, “that’s why I took off my glasses.” And putting his two hands hard on my shoulders, he kissed me.

It was an extremely nice kiss. It didn’t go on quite as long as Krishtof Bey’s, nor was it unpleasant or torrid. Halfway through he shifted his grip so that the leverage was better; and since he had wiped off my cream, I didn’t have to worry what he did with my nose. At the end he drew off and said, “You’ve been practicing. Can I have afters?”

If I hadn’t been scarlet with sunburn I suppose I would have been flushed up to the eyes. “Maybe I have,” I said. “But you don’t need any. You need an inhibiting agent.”

“I don’t mind, if she’s nice,” said Johnson, continuing to gaze into my eyes. He kissed me again, briefly, and then sat grinning maliciously at me and holding my hands.

Believe it or not, I had forgotten that tape recorder on Crab. I even returned the smile, gasping a little. “I thought I should remind you,” said Johnson frankly. “Anyway, everyone else seems to have had a ball, barring perhaps Mr. Tiko. What was all that stuff again about painful vacuity?”

“And pure thought,” I said.

“And pure thought. For some people, yes, Beltanno.”

“But not for me?”

“You haven’t had a pure thought since you were born,” said Johnson cheerfully. “You’re a mixture of horrible complexes, and you know it. But underneath that freeze-dried exterior lies a splendid unprogramed community known as Beltanno B. Loving.”

Outside the door, Trotter’s voice called from the cockpit, and we heard him go forward, and the rush of Spry’s feet. “We’re back,” said Johnson. “Back from danger; back from isolation; back into the great big world. Are you sorry?”

“Are you?” I said. Until that moment, I had forgotten.

He said, “It’s my chosen profession. I’m sorry that this time it seems to have coopted yourself, but don’t let it fret you. One more day will see the whole business finished, provided we can keep Harry quiet. Can we keep Harry quiet?”

“Why?” I said. “How? Will you bring the police over? Will they tell you who did all these things?”

Johnson got up. He collected my glass and his own, and putting them both in their slots, relatched the locker and put on his bifocal glasses. They flashed at me under the skylight: familiar, anonymous, unreadable. He said: “No need. I know who did all these things. I’ve known, actually, for a fairly long time.”

JOHNSON MAY HAVE THOUGHT he had spotted the culprit, but he refused blandly to drop even a hint. It was beneath me to argue. But I wanted to.

The green Daimler convertible was waiting for us when we landed on Crab Island, and we laid Harry in it and made for the barbecue, which was half over, as it had taken us all afternoon to tack south against that misguided wind. Spry had given us something to eat and we had all had more whiskey. Trotter and Johnson quarreled all the way to the house over whether to call the police forthwith or give Edgecombe twenty-four hours to try and deal with it.

I didn’t blame Trotter for wanting to broadcast his recent perils to the horrified ears of officialdom. Someone had tried to blow up a boatload of people, including me, and I thought it was time he was found and firmly led away in handcuffs. I can’t imagine, therefore, why I argued on Johnson’s side.

Not that it made a great deal of difference, since we couldn’t say who Johnson was. We arrived, and all we had got Trotter to promise was to give Edgecombe a hearing before informing the London
Times
, the British Minister for Defence and the University of Miami’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences. The assumption, of course, was that Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe was still alive; but we couldn’t appear to question that either.

All the same, when we drew up at the steps of the castle and Johnson made his way up to the doors with Harry folded over his shoulder, I found it hard to disguise my uneasiness. Behind us, strains of stereo music and laughter came from the beach and the gardens, and there were a lot of flushed-out flamingoes snaking moodily over the pathways and lawns. Then we followed Johnson inside, and the Begum’s butler came into the hall, and Johnson said, “Another casualty, I’m afraid, but not a serious one: just a bump on the head. Do you have a bed he could rest on?” And as houseboys appeared and removed Harry, dangling limply from his second injection, Johnson added, “Tell me, how is Sir Bartholomew?”

The Begum’s permanent staff were white, discreet, and formidably efficient. “Sir Bartholomew is remarkably well, sir, considering,” said the Begum’s butler. “He’s still in his room resting, but the nurse was quite pleased with him, so she said. I believe he is to come down for dinner.” He paused. “I’m quite sure he’s awake, sir, if you wish to visit him. Miss Violet has been with him for most of the afternoon.”

Miss Violet, I thought, has probably saved his life. But I didn’t say so.

She was just leaving as we reached Edgecombe’s room. She looked just the same except that she wore a net snood with a bow instead of the floppy white hat. Her make-up was impeccable. She asked us, I remember, how many fish we had caught, and Johnson said we had disposed of it all to a factory ship. Neither of them smiled.

Inside, Edgecombe was looking better, lying in bed with a book beside him and his bandaged arm laid stiffly beside it. Johnson and Trotter found two chairs and sat down talking, and I shut the door and went to perch on the bed. Johnson stopped discussing fish and said: “Bart. We want your advice. After you left, someone made a bonus effort to detonate
Dolly
. We know it’s aimed at you; we know the whole thing is classified, but Sergeant Trotter here thinks perfectly rightly that we can’t keep this to ourselves any longer. This time, we might all have been killed; next time we may be less lucky.” He paused. “Trotter wants to call the police right away. I’m willing to give you twenty-four hours to cover your tracks, or call in your superiors, or whatever you do in your dream world. Then I think really we shall have to take action.”

He had stuck, I observed, just the right note of uneasy officiousness. He was, of course, buying time: preventing Trotter and Harry from making the whole business instantly public. I hoped Edgecombe was well enough to appreciate it.

“My God,” said Edgecombe blankly. He looked from me to Johnson to Trotter. He said, “I wanted to come back, but Brady was so damned insistent…” He broke off and repeated, “My God, I’ve been lying here thinking, if they haven’t come back there can’t be anything wrong, because I’m not on board. How did it happen? Hell, how
could
it happen when I wasn’t there?”

We managed to raise his temperature a couple of points before we left him, which made me a little arbitrary with Johnson: I put both men out and stayed behind to administer a mild dose of quinalbarbitone. Then I sat beside Edgecombe until he stopped apologizing. Between them, he and Johnson had persuaded Trotter to let them have their precious twenty-four hours, although I didn’t see what they were going to do with it. Find out who set off
Haven
maybe, although I thought it unlikely. Wait for another attack on Bart Edgecombe, perhaps? Edgecombe grinned when I suggested it to him.

“I expect so,” he said. “But in the nature of a controlled experiment next time, I think. Johnson will tell me. Meanwhile within these four walls I’m all right. No hatches; no hidden doors; plenty of microphones, a radio transmitter, and an extremely strong lock on the door. You’re the one, poor girl, who’s had all the danger. I should think you’ll look back on all this as the weirdest two weeks of your life.” He leaned back drowsily, his hair ruffled, and took my hand as it lay on the coverlet. “Are you falling for Johnson?”

“Good heavens,” I said. “What makes you think so?”

“People do,” Edgecombe said. “Because he likes to surprise them.”

I smiled professionally. “Doctors aren’t easily surprised.” After a moment I said, “What sort of people?”

“His wife,” said Edgecombe gently, “for one.”

He was, in many ways, a feminine man. He would have made a good general practitioner. He understood women. He had understood Denise.

Unlike Johnson, who appeared feminine, and wasn’t. I said, without much of a pause, “I wish it would finish. He says he knows who it is, but he won’t tell.”

“I wonder if he does,” Edgecombe said.

It hadn’t occurred to me that Johnson might have been bluffing. I said, “It was Brady who loaded the
Haven
. And Brady who made sure he escaped before
Dolly
blew up. It was Brady who was there on the golf course when your wife…”

I broke off. This wasn’t the treatment he needed. But he answered me as I got to my feet. “So your guess would be Brady? But wasn’t it risky for him to be on board
Dolly
at all? What if my accident hadn’t happened? What if you hadn’t insisted on sending me back in the launch?”

“He would have made an excuse, surely,” I suggested. “A pain; an urgent appointment. But for Trotter and Johnson, none of us would have survived to check it.”

“Then what about Trotter?” said Edgecombe.

“
Trotter
?” I stared at him, I remember. That exhausted, obstinate, sunblistered little man in the ratlines, conning us through all the shallows. The steadfast swimmer on the end of a cable, dragging himself onto that live bomb of a boat.

“It was Trotter who caused the death of the waiter, or so Johnson said. At the water tower.”

I said, “But for Sergeant Trotter we shouldn’t be alive. Any of us.”

“Of course,” said Edgecombe. “He had to save his own skin. But for all you know, he may have been quite as anxious as Brady to take that launch back from
Dolly
, or to create a chance to leave you all and get back to Crab Island. Maybe Brady spoiled his plan, that was all.”

I was silent. It was not as easy as I had imagined.

“Or it might have been Krishtof Bey,” said Edgecombe sleepily, “who stayed behind and risked nothing at all. I rather like the idea of Krishtof Bey. That young man is by no means the romantic egoist that he seems.” He looked at me and smiled, his eyes heavy. “Poor Beltanno. Surrounded by decent young men, and you daren’t choose, do you? In case one of them is a very nasty young man indeed.”

“True,” I said bitterly. “But I can always sit on my ass and then see what’s left over.”

I changed, wigged, and looked up the old
Who’s Who
in the Begum’s dark library on my way out to the barbecue’s fading attractions.

Johnson Johnson it said; and a lot of truncated stuff about expensive education, a Royal Navy career, portrait painting, clubs, a public appointment or two, and addresses in London and Surrey. He was in his late thirties. And ten years ago he had married Judith Cicely Ballantyne, daughter of high court judge the Rt. Hon. Lord Ballantyne, without evident issue.

An unprolific espionage agent.

Krishtof Bey wasn’t married. Wallace Brady wasn’t in it.

The barbecue table was a large drum of wrought iron and concrete, designed for the Begum by Bjørn Wiinblad, with a hand-painted ceramic top in the green Akbar motif, price, including delivery and fitting, $1500 because I asked.

I had a late steak bespoken by the Begum, who mentioned Bart Edgecombe and my painful sunburn in the same courteous passage, but was more concerned that I should meet the lustier of her other seventy-four guests. Johnson I saw at a beach table surrounded by a knot of glossy admirers: Trotter beside him was busy with three cans of beer and another plateful of steak.

I have never seen so many photographed people together in one place: for one-night stands the Begum evidently invited one-night people. The quality might not be durable, but for a battery life of five or six hours, the sparkle was stunning.

I got between a top male model and an Italian producer and began to glow presently with well-being and sunburn like a smallbore central heating conversion between a pair of quartz iodine spot lamps.

“Why, hullo, Doctor MacRannoch!” said Wallace Brady.

The male model turned full face his glorious profile. He said, “You can’t fool me: don’t expect me to dig it. A beautiful girl like you can’t be a doctor?”

“She is,” said Brady. “Ask them at the United Commonwealth Hospital.”

“Nonsense,” said the producer. “Doctors play golf and wear boned foundations with many suspenders. Even male doctors wear many suspenders. I know. I have been to every doctor in Rome with my feet.”

“I have,” I said, “an infallible cure of my own for the many who suffer in such silence, such fortitude, with their feet.”

“Yes?” said the producer. The male model’s magnificent mane bent close to mine.

“You will need pencil and paper,” I said.

“I have it. I have it!” said the producer. He slit a reefer in half, smoothed the paper and waited, ball point poised. I dictated.

I left while they were still expressing their abstracted thanks, and correcting their spelling. Wallace Brady said, “Beltanno?”

“Yes?” I said. There were seventy-odd people around me, but I clung to my beach bag with my gun in it.

“Am I mistaken, or was that a prescription for pure sulphuric acid?” said Wallace Brady.

The sun was hot between the beach chairs and the umbrellas:
Dolly
’s launch passed with a man and a girl on monoskis, showing off. The stereo was whisking the Cream and the sea was full of sailfish and dark glasses and brown, naked spines. Brady led me over the beach and up to the Begum’s long palmetto-thatched bar, where he put in an order. “It was,” I said, “an inert placebo containing the constituents of an excellent itching powder. Why didn’t you come back and take me off
Dolly
?”

“Did you want me to?” Brady said. “Edgecombe’s all right, you know. The nurse was waiting for us when we stepped on the jetty.” He grinned. “And the Lady Violet was a tower of strength.” He was wearing swimming trunks and, set in the deeply tanned face, the gray eyes were paler than ever. I said, “It turned out all right, but I would have felt happier. And Sir Bart says he wanted to come back.”

“He did,” said Wallace Brady without any visible hesitation whatever. “But I put him off it. If you want the real truth, Beltanno, I didn’t want you with Edgecombe at all, and to hell with M.I. Five and C.I.A. and all the rest of the guys earning their Civil List pensions. I got knocked out last time for saying so, but that doesn’t stop me from saying so again. That Edgecombe business is dangerous. They’ve no right to get a person like you mixed up in it.”

“A beautiful girl like me,” I corrected him. The drink order had come. It consisted of a whole pineapple with a couple of straws in it.

“I don’t use other people’s vapid expressions,” said Wallace Brady. He indicated the pineapple. “I got it this way, since you’re creeping about like the Great Gatsby’s girl friend. You suck that straw and I suck this one, and all we get are each other’s diseases. Stick your gun under the table.”

I pushed my beach bag in silence under the table, while he carried the pineapple down and set it between us. It was filled with a number of things. Lemon. Vermouth. Angostura. And of course, at least two types of rum. We sucked, with our noses nearly touching, and Wallace Brady stroked my hand under the table.

If he was disconcerted that we had come back alive, he didn’t show it: quite the reverse. All it proved was that he was perfectly sure of himself, and that neither the damage on
Dolly
or the radio installations on the
Haven
could possibly be traced back to him. We talked, rather stiltedly, about golf. He didn’t ask me to go anywhere with him, and I wouldn’t have gone if he had. I had the larger share of the pineapple because I wanted rather suddenly to get away quickly. As my straw bubbled its way to dry dock he raised his head and said, “Beltanno: don’t marry Mr. Tiko.”

Jesus Christ, Mr. Tiko. I rose to my feet and the Begum, floating gauzily in the distance, turned and registered reception of my anxiety. I bent and received my beach bag from Wallace Brady. I thanked him for that and the punch. “You won’t, will you?” he said. “His long game is maybe all right, but his putting is terrible.”

I walked off without answering him, and the Begum received me. “You’ve remembered your dear Japanese gentleman.”

I do not enjoy apologizing, but it was through me, after all, that Mr. Tiko had been invited at all. The Begum heard me with a smile and said, “Darling Beltanno, he is charming and I would marry him myself tomorrow were I five feet high and not already supporting the id of James Ulric.”