Roman Nights: Dolly and the Starry Bird; Murder in Focus

by Dorothy Dunnett

  I remembered the second key in his hand. I looked at Jacko and Jacko said, ‘Innes gave you the key to Mouse Hall?’

  ‘Well . . .’ said Johnson. We were eating Innes’s biscuits in the kitchen, since work makes you hungry. Jacko said accusingly, ‘You stole that bloody key!’

  ‘Well,’ said Johnson. ‘I should like to know what he’s got in that building. After all, I’ve practically slept with his mouse.’

  Innes’s pad is five minutes away, and, even with the wisteria off it, looks more fit for Giselle than Innes. But within the pillars it was once an observatory. Its corrugated roof moves on a long ratchet which slides back at the touch of a switch. If its own generator should fail, which Heaven forbid, the roof can be rolled back with a kind of starting handle. But since Innes created his Incubator the roof has never been rolled back and there have been no power failures, for the simple reason that Innes took everything to pieces and replaced it with British Imperial Standard, to the last twist of fuse wire and screw. We in the observatory envy Innes.

  We envy him for more than that. While we congeal in the Dome, Innes works day and night at a comfortable 68° Fahrenheit, because that is what the Incubator fancies. Otherwise it would rust up like a tin can from humidity.

  The gush of warm air greeted us the moment Johnson unlocked the door and we tiptoed in. I don’t know why we tiptoed in, except that neither Jacko nor I had ever been in Mouse Hall on our own before. It felt like stealing more of Innes’s biscuits. I shut the door fast behind us and walked up beside Johnson Johnson, who was looking as everybody looks when they first step into an electronic workshop. That is, blasé.

  This is the fault of the S.F. kiddie shows on the telly. In Innes’s workshop, two thirds of the walls, benches and floor space are covered with banks of dials filled with illuminated rows of running numbers. Discs of coloured light flicker on and off all about you: rows of scarlet horseshoes shimmer and wink; machinery buzzes and drones and the air conditioning breathes at you heavily. Because electronic machinery doesn’t like being switched on and off, Mouse Hall is always furtively busy as well as cosy. The total effect is pure Disney.

  I knew exactly how Johnson’s mind was working. If it looks spurious when it is real, it wouldn’t be very hard to make it look real when it is spurious. He walked to the end of the room, where Poppy poked her white nose out of her cage, her eyes sparkling like garnets from the clinical orderliness of the work bench and tool- making area. A corrugated wall partition, running on tracks, could divide the room when the lathe was in action. The Incubator, along with Innes, didn’t tolerate dust.

  An oscilloscope, plugged into a faulty photon developer, displayed a jagged green line, trembling, on its rectangular screen. ‘He has a laser?’ Johnson said. He was offering Poppy a sunflower seed. She sniffed it, twitching, and then drawing it from his fingers, ran with it into her medicated nest of white shredded Cuddle, from whence the sound of cracking emerged.

  ‘She would stay longer if it was Innes,’ I said. ‘She isn’t very tame . . . We all use the laser. To test new equipment, for example. Opticals come in from Switzerland, and we keep the truest and send the others all back. It’s done by passing light through a half-silvered plate of very true glass, separating the beams and then marrying them on return.’

  ‘Then you need a good deal of power?’ Johnson said.

  Everyone always mentions the power because the wires are so obvious. Every workshop is hanging with wires, and this was no exception. Hanks of coloured wire descended from almost everything visible. At the Dome, our main cable runs around an open pelmet just above arm’s reach under the cupola. Innes’s travels all over the ceiling and down one wall. We work on 500 volts and make do. ‘Innes has two thousand volts there,’ I said, ‘if he wants it. And it’s connected to the Incubator. That’s why we never remove the casing if Innes isn’t here. No one would like telescope-flavoured crisps.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Johnson, and turned to the middle of the floor at long last. ‘Ah, yes. So this is the Incubator.’

  The Incubator was, of course, pure science fiction, bedded in concrete because of its weight, with a working surface built all around it. It was dazzling white like an igloo: another of Innes’s precautions. No damp could get through the casing of foam plastic blocks which enclosed it. They were cut as with a jigsaw, fat and warm and solid with calculations scribbled all over them, and fringes of thin coloured wires festooned below.

  There were sheets and sheets of calculations on the work surface also, all neatly pinned to backing boards and numbered in Innes’s writing: if Innes wasn’t engaged in advanced scientific work of an experimental nature, he was giving a very good impression of it. Johnson walked all around it and said, ‘Should I understand what it does, if you told me?’

  ‘We can’t even tell you,’ Jacko said. ‘Innes would have to do that, or some buff at the Trust, and the chances are that you wouldn’t understand, anyway. But you can take my word that he’s a fully qualified scientist in his line, just as he’s a fully qualified stuffed shirt in private life, the poor little bastard.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Johnson into a sudden silence, ‘he isn’t a solo vibraphone player suborned by the Chinese for luncheon vouchers. But that’s no secret; we know all about his career . . . The point is, what is he doing in Velterra?’

  ‘The point is,’ I said, ‘what are you doing in Velterra? You’ve switched off the power.’

  ‘Christ!’ said Jacko with more reverence than I have ever heard from him except in the developing room. He hurried over to where Johnson was standing in front of the switchboard. Johnson continued to stand in front of the switchboard and Jacko came to a halt. ‘The damage,’ said Johnson mildly, ‘is done. Why not make the most of it?’

  With the power hum absent, the silence screamed at you. All around us the lights had gone out; the needles, shocked, were oscillating to a standstill. In her cage Poppy still cracked industriously over her seed. Whatever experiment or series of experiments had been ticking on inside the shed, everything had come to a halt. I said, ‘That was inexcusable. That was inexcusable even for a layman. Nobody does that, ever, to another man’s work.’

  I know Jacko felt exactly the same. We both stared at Johnson and met nothing at all but the blank, icy flash of his spectacles. ‘As Timothy would say, silly me,’ Johnson said in a voice as hard as his bifocals and, walking forward, laid hands on blocks of foam plastic and proceeded methodically to remove them. Then, when it was all laid bare, he turned to me and Jacko and said curtly, ‘Well?’

  I don’t think even I had realized the delicacy and complexity of what Innes was doing before that. But for the network of fine coloured wires that hung everywhere, the inside of the Incubator might have been a fantasia of pure abstract design; a garden of convoluted plastic as fine as paper sculpture, interlaced with silvery wafers of metal and stiffened, here and there, with arcs and rods of stuff more solid. There was a red laser fitted inside it. What else there was could hardly be distinguished in the grey light from the single small window. I leaned forward, holding my breath, and a little jet of light sprang from Johnson’s hand into the central bank of the machine. He handed me the torch and I used it and then gave it to Jacko.

  Jacko switched it off and looked at me. ‘I can’t tell,’ he said. ‘It’s more advanced than anything I’ve ever seen before. It seems to have to do with cosmic ray tracking, but that might be only the initial stage towards something much more important. It isn’t a fake and it isn’t a toy, which leaves us all out on a limb. However well we put all this back, Innes is bound to know from his records that his power’s been switched off, and when.’

  ‘I see,’ Johnson said. He had a last look inside the Incubator himself and then, with great delicacy, began building the nest of white blocks around its contours again. ‘We can’t fake it?’

  ‘We can’t fake it,’ I said with finality.

  ‘And you wouldn’t if you could,’ said Johnson, stepping b
ack and pressing down again the handle of the power board. With a whine, the air conditioning came into action and the twinkling dials, roused to life, began presenting their hurrying messages. ‘But as it happens, it doesn’t much matter. Since it seems Innes has nothing to hide, then it is unlikely that Innes will take issue over a check-up. Particularly as there is one matter that he hasn’t yet explained to us fully himself.’

  ‘What?’ said Jacko. I didn’t say anything, because I was thinking.

  ‘The revolver,’ said Johnson. ‘The one he said he got off a card, which proved so alarmingly genuine, was a Dardick. The toy guns on the card were seven-bullet Glisentis, and there wasn’t one missing. Innes fired his own gun there this morning.’

  We left after that; Johnson to have a lush dinner with Maurice and Timothy, and Jacko and I to return to the Dome. Jacko sat on the office desk and conducted a long telephone conversation full of heavy breathing with Di, at the end of which he put some new film in his camera and went off singing ‘Arrivederci Roma’ in a passionate baritone.

  I was on duty from seven, and it wasn’t worth going home. I waited till the phone had cooled down from Jacko and then rang Charles and cheered him up. That is, I meant to; but instead of being mollified by the tale of how Johnson and Di and I had spent our lunchtime he turned out to be spitting with rage. After a while I realized that most of the four-letter words were being applied to my absent friend Johnson for having the bloody nerve to take two silly cows to hold his hand while he went and unfortunately oathing well failed to get himself drilled full of bullet holes. This was very nice and I spent a quarter of an hour soothing him before I went off upstairs and got the cupola opened. It revealed a splendid blanket of cloud which looked as if it was going to settle down for the night and, in fact, did. I waited dutifully till midnight, and then went off home to Charles.

  He had put all the paper-covered novels back in the bottom of the drawers and otherwise cleared up the effects of the search, though unable to distinguish between bras and bikinis, and the tights with a few holes had become mingled forever with the tights with a lot of holes and the tights with no holes at all. He seemed glad to see me and proved it. I had to admit that Charles was really rather splendid. I was well aware that in the Stone Age there would have been a queue of fur-coated ladies at the cave mouth on a rotating basis. It was because I was sure I should have been one of them that I refrained from marrying Charles. I know I have the slave temperament, but there was no reason why he should find out.

  Lying there in ergonomic total comfort, with our hair mixed together, I said, ‘There’s a full moon coming up, as from Saturday.’ On Saturday, we were going to Naples together. That is, Jacko and I had business to do there, and Charles said he would come and chaperone us.

  And after that, no more bloody night shifts, just paperwork. I don’t know when I have felt more contented.

  Next morning we all went to the Castel Sant’ Angelo.

  The behaviour therapists have got it all taped: there is nothing like a good night in the hay for taking the edge off the verve next morning. At nine o’clock Charles and I reported to the gates of the villa to pick up Diana as directed, and proceeded in lacklustre silence to Innes’s digs. Innes was in sparkling form and sounded off on the trade figures for November for five solid minutes until Di told him very briefly what to do with them. Then we had a long, silent journey into Rome and over the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele to the garden just outside the castle, where Charles parked the Alfa and said a prayer over it. Then we all got out and walked in silence around the corner to the Castel Sant’ Angelo and our rendezvous with Johnson Johnson.

  The fortress of St Angelo is an ancient papal funk hole connected to the Vatican by miles of covered passageway and built at the head of one of the bridges over the Tiber. There is a narrow road filled with frantic Roman traffic between the castle and the river. If you cross to the opposite pavement you can lean on the wall and look down on the water, which is yellow and sluggish and full of weeds with broken boats lying in them. The bridge is guarded by a couple of curly-haired angels and a chestnut vendor, who was sitting on his box glaring at the other side of the road, where stood a jolly little truck covered with coloured balloons and the legend occhiali giocattoli on the side of it. Johnson stood on the pavement beside it, a balloon in his hand.

  ‘Christ!’ said Charles, and skidded to an utter and invincible halt. ‘Not on your effing nelly.’

  Considering what he thought about Johnson, we were lucky to have got him so far. Di and I looked at one another. Di said, ‘Please yourself, lover. I thought you wanted to save us from the pistol-packing peasantry?’

  I shoved my elbow into her side. No one had said anything about Innes’s gun, least of all Innes. If he knew his power had been cut off the night before, he was getting nothing but kicks from it. He looked radiant. More or less. Charles said violently, ‘You’re not going there either. Or Ruth.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I said. We had been over all that. It was the sight of Johnson and the Occhiali Giocattoli that did it. I added, ‘Look. I’ll be perfectly safe. Innes and I are on standby, knowledgeably examining the castle. Di will be draped on the wall, being photographed by you with the chestnut vendor. All we have to do is watch, and help if there’s trouble. I ask you, love. If someone comes up and buys that balloon, you can’t expect Johnson to idle along with a load of toy glasses, pursuing him. The girls look after the wagon. You and Innes and Johnson light out and follow him, in the car or on foot.’

  ‘I forgot to ask,’ said Innes, ‘how do we make sure that no one but the right person is given the balloon with the fish in it? . . . I’m sure,’ he added, ‘that our ingenious oil-painting acquaintance has thought of a method.’

  He bared his de-scaled incisors in a smile. So he did know, I thought, about Johnson’s visit to Mouse Hall. I wondered if Poppy had told him, and then reckoned that if Johnson had left that extra sunflower seed in evidence she probably had. Di said, ‘The message is in a red balloon again, the only one on the stall. And it’s firmly tied to the framework so that it has to be asked for. That’s all we can do. That, and try and use the same exchange of words that you had with Mr Paladrini when you bought Ruth’s balloon.’

  I had dredged my memory for those, and now I recited them. Charles had said, ‘I’ll take that one if it’s got a fish in it.’ And Mr Paladrini had said, ‘Only the red balloons have fish in them.’

  Charles stared at me as I repeated it. He then laughed wildly. ‘An intricately coded exchange of terrifying complexity. It struck me at once, I remember.’

  We had got him walking again and we were now level with Johnson who was wearing a lot of long clothes and a pair of dark glasses. He looked like Paul Muni in a very old feature movie and was coining money; he sold three clockwork mice and a gun while we were looking at him. Then Di strolled across and told him what Charles had said to the balloon man and then strolled back and, taking Charles’s arm, led him across the road to the river wall.

  In a moment she was arranged up it like Virginia creeper; it is a habit photographers’ models seem to have when faced with any piece of rough masonry, and is one of the few occasions on which they do not require a gale-force wind. Innes and I had a brief conversation with Johnson about a jumping dog, which I bought, and then retired to the entrance arch of the castle to study Diana’s Baedeker, lent us for the occasion. Having been already right through the villa and twice around the Dome, it had acquired a number of annotations which didn’t date back to 1900, when it set out to render the traveller as independent as possible of guides and valets-de-place, to protect him against extortion and be the means of saving him from many a trial of temper, for there are few countries, as the editor pointed out, where the patience is more severely tried than in some parts of Italy.

  Check. Lower down, someone had underlined the bit that said, Where ladies are of the party, the expenses are generally greater; and someone else, in a different colour, had put a range of exc
lamation marks after The fierce rays of the Italian sun seldom fail to sap the physical and mental energy. Charles and I, as I recall, had puzzled briefly over Lieux d’Aisance (10c) and the ensuing list of addresses until we realized, with gentle awe, that we were looking at the birthplace of the loo.

  I mentioned it to Innes, to see if he would be embarrassed, but he wasn’t. One up for America. We bought tickets into the castle and wandered devotedly up and down the courtyard, peering out on occasion, and watching the time creep on towards the hour of assignation at noon. Charles photographed Di for the eighteenth time and I began to get jealous. Noon arrived, and left.

  At fifteen minutes past twelve, a man who had been reading a newspaper on the other side of the road folded it and began to cross, then nipped back as the traffic lights changed and five hundred Fiats moved forward like bath buns on a conveyor belt: The ordinary Italian rarely walks if he can possibly drive, and how walking can afford pleasure is to him an inexplicable mystery. A family of five, approaching from the pavement, began to converge on the toy wagon, the children squealing ‘Questo?’ A chauffeur-driven limousine with Maurice in it drew up and stopped.

  He put his head out of the window and said, ‘Poor creature,’ in English, and then called to Johnson in excruciating Italian, ‘And how is your wife, my dear fellow?’

  On the other side of the road, Charles had stopped photographing Diana and had turned around with the words The wicked old bastard! as clear on his face as if he had spoken them. The family of five had arrived at the cart and were whistling to attract Johnson’s attention. The children were all holding revolvers. The man with the newspaper arrived on the right side of the road and, standing with his hands in his pockets, was studying the contents of the wagon. Johnson, whose Italian, it seemed, was far from excruciating, turned a gaze like a pining jerboa upon the electrically operated windows of Maurice’s limousine and informed him rapidly that his wife suffered, alas, in herself, but was all the better for his lordship’s inquiry.