Split Code: Dolly and the Nanny Bird

by Dorothy Dunnett

  No one told her the reason. On police advice, the Booker-Readmans and I were all going to the Okmulgee World Championship Rodeo with Benedict’s carrycot and a dummy inside.

  I had heard of more original and even more sensible suggestions. but I was far from objecting to any device which might lead to nabbing our elephant friend or Klapper, or Vladimir. Or at the very least, a bareback Texas cowpoke for Charlotte.

  I wondered, after his burst of participation at the Wonderland, if Johnson would phone me in the next couple of days, if only to say he was glad to have known me. He didn’t. A boyfriend of Charlotte’s knew someone who’d been to a dinner party he’d given at the New York Yacht Club, and someone else’s employer came home stoned from another at the Harvard Club at which Johnson had been principal guest. He had at least one sitting from Rosamund and two others that I knew of from Philly socialites. He was playing hard to get. So I went to the Rodeo on the strength of the only real piece of advice the Department had bothered to give me: agree to everything.

  There are nineteen thousand raked seats round the big bran ring in Madison Square Garden, and the first person I saw down by the barrier was Gramps Eisenkopp in his sonic wheelchair. He was waving. An eighteen-year-old redhead in an Indian brow- band and braids sitting on the arm of his chair waved as well, giggling, and half the stadium waved back, hoping to make her neckline move half an inch to the right. Rosamund said, ‘My God.’

  Simon said, ‘I think you should sympathize, darling. Imagine living in the same house as Comer with nothing but backnumbers of Rogue and Dude and Nugget to keep you going.’ He pulled down his shirt cuffs under the Dunhill hopsack blazer and leaned back in his orange seat. Rosamund was also dressed for the wananchi in a jersey print with a tie-hankie on her hair, and kept knocking the carrycot with her elbow.

  Eventually, I transferred it to my other side, next to the passageway. where it could be attacked more easily. Denny Donovan, who came in a bit later with Charlotte, leaned over the loge steps and cooed winningly at the wrapped shape of the china doll, before settling down across the passage. Charlotte in cheesecloth with oasis-green eye-shadow, peered under the hood and gave an even more realistic flinch. ‘I’m sorry to tell you, he needs changing, Jo. Want me to do it?’

  Surrounded by hate from the adjoining spectators I said, ‘You won’t notice it when the cattle come on.’

  There were two detectives behind us. I supposed there might be others, watching. I wondered if any of the Department’s men were about. In all the recent upheavals, I had never come across any. And tonight I wanted support, for I didn’t know what to expect. Nothing was going according to expectations. No one had attacked me. No one had laid a finger on me, even at Missy’s American Wonderland, with three accredited villains in the offing. Only Benedict had been threatened, in terms I couldn’t forget: Mr and Mrs Booker-Readman, I have your son. He is nailed in a box, without food and drink . . .

  I had said to Simon in the cab, with the china doll in its box on my knees, ‘What if it’s a trick? What if it’s a plot to get Benedict out of the way while Donovan and the rest of us are sitting like fools at the Rodeo?’

  ‘Really, Joanna,’ had said Rosamund. ‘The police did think of that. They’ll leave a plain-clothes man with Mrs Mallard. Obviously, we have to have Donovan here, to convince people we’re bringing the baby.’

  Obviously. Down in the front, Gramps Eisenkopp turned round again, flapping a stetson, which he rammed on his head, grinning. His black wig, shifting a little, peered over his brow, but his broad, thin-lipped grin stayed unaltered. Charlotte, leaning over her Data-Mate, said, ‘He used to ride in the Cow Palace rodeos when he was young. Would you believe it? Bunty told me.’

  ‘Jeeze. Hence the Buckle Bunnies,’ said Donovan, interested. Pocahontas had been joined by two girls in curled hats and pointed lizard-skin boots and pink slip-ware faces. Rodeo groupies usually hung about behind the scenes, waiting for the best- looking bull riders. No one could call Grandpa Eisenkopp good- looking, but who cared, with those financial resources? I wondered what the socially sensitive Comer and his gorgeous Beverley thought of Grandpa’s hick past. If you believed Hugo, the brainstorm which removed him from active life had reached his relatives as one of the minor blessings from Providence.

  I also understood why no one had been allowed to bring Grover.

  Below us, the band struck up, the lights dimmed and the Grand Parade poured into the dazzling well of the ring. There were a lot of cowgirls, in hats and feathers and fringes and sequins, and quite a lot of nice-looking cowboys and Indians, and some clowns. A Red Indian sang. I was aware of my confidence sinking as I looked at those clowns. Saggy Baggy Elephants and clowns: they have one thing in common. You can’t recognize them.

  Then the Parade juddered out through the red wooden corrals, and the rodeo started.

  A rodeo is like a circus in which every other act is an open contest, for money. There was a total of eighty-five thousand dollars riding that night on six competitions, and even Rosamund and Simon, exuding well-brought-up and faintly ginned-up boredom, began to sit up slightly as the five-thousand dollar bucking broncos shot out with their yipping, one-handed riders from Tx, Fl, Ok, Nev, Mich, Wash and even wilder cow country such as Bronx, N.Y.

  Each rider has to stay on his horse for eight seconds, and to swing his heels up on the horse’s neck at every jump, which is why it looks and sounds like an octopus beating a rug in a hurricane. I remembered, half-way through, to turn and pat the frilled quilt on the carrycot, being conscious that Benedict, had he been present, would have been adding to the Perceived Noise Decibels in no uncertain way by this time. Fortunately, such was the pandemonium, it was impossible to tell he wasn’t. A man called Clint got seventy-five marks and won ten thousand dollars. We applauded him. No one attacked us.

  The Mexican trick roping came on, and the calf roping contest, which showed how hard it is to knock down anything with a leg at each corner. Simon laughed all through that one, and Rosamund smiled twice. I patted the blankets.

  A cowboy sang hill-billy songs with a guitar, and Donovan roared out the choruses. Rosamund looked at her watch and one of the detectives bent forward and said, ‘I think your baby’s crying, ma’am.’

  It was a bloody charade. I bent forward and patted it hard enough to crack its china buttocks. The last bronco bucked and the winner was announced: Chuck Loos from Tecumsek, nine thousand dollars. Clowns and cowgirls and pickup men poured on to the pitch while the band played, and the voices of the beer and Coca-Cola men shrieked through the noise of the audience. Down below, Gramps Eisenkopp was showing off his wheelchair to the Buckle Bunnies, giving it orders to run right and left along the passageway and grinning and waving at intervals in our general direction. A piercing squeal behind me proved to be the Coke- summoning call of a six-year-old black girl in a shirred bodice, coloured bows and a topknot.

  An orange-shirted vendor with a shoulder-high board of candyfloss sticks walked past the wheelchair and started climbing the staircase towards us.

  Donovan got up and began buying beer for himself and Charlotte. The candyfloss merchant, arriving on the step above us, unslotted a pink stick and proceeded to flog it to the six-year-old who wanted a Coke. The large glistening wand of spun sugar, waving in argument, stuck successively on the hair of the first detective and the coat of the second, both of whom twisted round, snapping. The candyfloss, jolted, left the vendor’s grasp and nosedived straight under the hood of Ben’s carrycot.

  Surprised and aggrieved, the vendor turned on both detectives. ‘Hey, you gonna pay for that? Who’ll buy that, now? You buy it for the baby? The baby’s got it anyhow, man, ain’t he?’

  He hadn’t, because I had snatched the stick up the moment it landed on the coverlet and was holding it out. But as he spoke, the vendor hooked one thick finger under the hood of the carrycot and jerked. The hood folded back, revealing the silent hatted cocoon of the china doll, sunk motionless under its blankets.
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  ‘Ain’t that a dog?’ said the vendor. ‘Is he human, that baby?

  You land a big piece of candy in his lap and he just goes on sleepin’?’

  ‘You land Jane Fonda in his lap and he’ll just go on sleeping as well,’ I said. ‘At two months he’s got no discrimination. Push off, will you? I don’t want him wakened.’ A woman in white sequins had begun to sing with the band. Shouts of Hey, sit down, willya! and Push off! added themselves to the invitation of the two detectives and the yowls of the six-year-old Coke-hunter. Donovan had turned round, a beer can in either hand. I pulled up the hood of the carrycot.

  ‘O.K.’ said the vendor. ‘O lousy K. I get it. You don’t want the effing stick. The poor man always pays. You take it an’ shut your mouth.’ And thrusting the candyfloss into the child’s nerveless black hand, he stumped off down the steps with his tray.

  The two detectives looked at one another. Donovan slowly sat down and had one of the beers removed by Charlotte. Simon said, ‘Listen.’

  Rosamund took a pair of dark glasses out of her handbag and put them on. ‘What?’ she said.

  “He’s put his cap on backwards,’ said Simon.

  ‘Well?’ said Rosamund. One of the detectives stood up.

  Simon said. ‘None of them wears his cap backwards. He had the peak in front a moment ago. Joanna, what did he see?’

  I was in no doubt. I said, ‘He saw all there was to see: I think it was deliberate. In which case . . .’

  ‘It was a signal,’ said the second detective, and jumped out into the passage just as the vendor, below us, looked over his shoulder. The soprano hit a loaded B flat. Donovan, also jumping into the passage, shouted ‘Stop that man’ and began racing down the steps after the plain-clothes man. Grandpa Eisenkopp, twisting round, gave his chair a fast order and sat, blocking the left-hand passage along the barrier. The right-hand passage, before the vendor could turn, was closed off by the quicker detective. The vendor threw his tray in the face of the slower one, and vaulted up on to the barrier.

  Both detectives made a grab, but Donovan was quicker still. He took a gun from his pocket, aimed and fired. In a flash of orange the vendor fell, rolling into the arena, to be lost to sight for a moment in a ground-swell of clowns and horses and cowgirls. Charlotte squeaked, and so did three or four other people - not more - who had seen him. The ice hockey plant doctor’s visage was a cherry rectangle of pleasure. ‘Oh boy, I got him,’ he said, and tugged the sleeve of one of the detectives. ‘Did you see that? I got himl’

  ‘Got who? What’s that?’ snapped the lieutenant, tearing his gaze from the crowd in the ring.

  ‘It’s a dart gun. It fires tipped darts. They induce unconsciousness in thirty seconds. Clear the ring,’ said Donovan joyously. ‘Clear the ring. The bastard’ll be lying hyped in a heap of cow-flop. All you have to do is heave him and charge him.’

  Simon had joined the rest of us, staring into the ring for a glimpse of a bright orange tunic. ‘What with?’ he said. ‘Wearing his vending cap backwards?’

  Donovan gazed back at him, his ruddy face paling. ‘Well . . .’ he said.

  ‘You do realize,’ the first detective said, his hard gaze still on the arena, ‘that if this cat presses charges, we can put you behind bars for unprovoked assault with a weapon?’

  ‘What?’ said Donovan.

  ‘So you’ve got to hope,’ said the second detective, ‘that he’s into somethin’ real big, like recycling heroin balloons in a bubblegum factory. How soon d’you say that stuff knocks them out?’

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ said Donovan. He said it in a much quieter voice.

  ‘All righty,’ said the first detective. ‘Where is he? He didn’t have time to cross the ring and there it is, just about clear. There’s no candyfloss vendor lying hyped out on that bran. Look at it.’

  There wasn’t. The Indians had gone, and the cowboys, and the clowns. Nothing was left but the announcer and a mounted cowgirl in blue satin with a riding crop in her mouth, waiting for the barrel horse racing. Donovan said, ‘I hit him. I tell you, I hit him. He must be about some place.’

  The detectives exchanged glances. ‘We’ll look,’ one of them said. ‘Listen, man. Assuming you hit him, and assuming this kooky stuff works, how long is it till he wakes up?’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ Donovan said. ‘I’ll come and help you. He’ll be lying . . .’

  The sound of Grandpa Eisenkopp’s voice talking to his wheelchair intruded on the discussion. ‘Listen boys,’ said Grandpa Eisenkopp. ‘I kin identify the bastard. You all get along home. I don’t mind staying.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mr Eisenkopp,’ I said. ‘We’d better stay. The baby’s at home, you know. This is just a doll in the basket. It was a kind of decoy.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ said Grandpa Eisenkopp. There was a quantity of shushing, which he ignored. The Booker-Readmans, repressively, had resumed their seats.

  The old man looked up at me. ‘What made them think the kid would be snatched at a rodeo? Damn fool place to bring a squeaker.’

  ‘It was just a theory,’ I said. ‘And I had the tickets you sent, so we thought we’d go along with it. The police ought to thank you. You took a risk, blocking the passageway.’

  ‘Of course I did,’ said Grandpa Eisenkopp. ‘And what do they do? Hot-damn, they let the guy over the barrier. You should have told me what was going to happen. It annoys the hell outa me to be treated as ga-ga. I coulda tied a rope to the chair and lassoed him.’ He turned round and swore, mildly, at the barrage of complaint rising behind him.

  I said, ‘I’d better go to my seat. See you later.’

  I found when I climbed up that someone had shoved the carrycot under the seat and Charlotte was there in its place. She tucked my hand under her arm and squeezed it, and gradually, I began to see what I was looking at. One by one, twelve cowgirls in stetsons and tight-fitting clobber shot into the ring to race a cloverleaf course round three barrels.

  It was right up Grandpa’s street, this one.

  It was spectacular. The hooves drummed. The bran flew. The girls galloped over and heeled, close-hauled as a yacht round the barrel, with the reins sheeted far out in one hand. Behind me, someone said ‘Excuse me,’ tapping my shoulder.

  I turned to face the indignant pouched eyes of a lady with deep chestnut hair like a wasp’s nest, and earrings. She said, ‘You will excuse me, but I must tell you that it is against the principles of accepted hygiene to lay any young child on this floor.’

  Behind me, everyone gasped as a horse kicked a barrel. Beside me, her dark glasses trained straight ahead, Rosamund was ignoring the visitation. To the head on my shoulder I said, ‘It’s all right. The cot’s empty. But thank you.’ The rider had recovered and made a good exit: there was a round of applause, and a platinum blonde with a pigtail stood waiting for the flag to come down.

  The lady behind me said, ‘Excuse me. I must tell you that I saw you talking to your little girl.’

  ‘Little boy,’ I said automatically, and caught myself up. ‘That is . . . Really, don’t worry. He’s not here; he’s at home.’ The pouched eyes, puzzled and resentful, stared back into my smile. The pigtailed rider threw her horse into the ring in a shower of chocolate peat and I noticed that they hadn’t had time to fix the barrels in position again after the previous rider. One of them was several inches to one side of its buried marker.

  Just then, the nearest judge saw it, and flagged the race to a stop. The platinum pigtail looked furious, with reason. The next time the flag came down, she was out like a shell from a cannon.

  She was so angry in fact that she nearly crashed the first barrel. The horse skidded round with nothing to spare, found its feet and stampeded across to the next drum.

  It was the one the judge had just corrected, and it should have been firmly centred, but wasn’t. It was four inches off, and as the horse exploded up to its side it moved four inches further, straight into the horse’s powerful shoulder.

  There
was a horrific noise, made up of a bang and a howl. As in the slow-motion frame of a popcorn-chomping oldie, the horse and the barrel climbed up one another, hesitated, and then languidly parted company. The horse slid sideways, mane flowing, and ejected its rider before sinking into the peat, rolling and kicking. The girl fell face first into the flaccid brown mould. The drum, moving as if on an ice rink, performed several drunken parabolas. It then assumed the vertical, rose three inches, and moving on dirty white sneakers, swam toddling off like the Queen of the Wilis.

  We all sat, mouths open, and watched it. It was Grandpa Eisenkopp, down there in his chair who screeched to the men at his side, ‘Well, go on! Hog-tie it! Get the crittur! Where’s your pigging-string? Get him down, boys! Throw him! Brand him!’

  Rosamund said, ‘He’ll have another stroke,’ but she snatched her glasses off to see better. Both the pickup men had their ropes in their hands. The drum, running in diagonals, clanged into one yellow barrier, paused to recharge and lifting its tin skirts, proceeded to recross the peat to a swelling back-up of clapping and catcalls and laughter. Then a rope span through the air and the white noose drooped and tightened and tugged.

  For part of a second the barrel ran frantically backwards. It toppled. It jumped backwards, tugged like a bull-calf. It rose into the air, leaving behind it its contents: a candyfloss vendor in orange.

  Donovan’s dart had done all he claimed it would. It had dropped the vendor in the ring, with just enough strength to crawl under a barrel. And it had wakened him up again, after ten minutes. He had enough sense restored to recognize the way out, as well.

  There were horses waiting in the corrals, and cattle behind in the compound, but the candyfloss merchant went through them like a hooked marlin. One of the judges trotted after. The pickup men didn’t bother, and everyone else was laughing too much to think of following.

  Except Charlotte and me. Running headlong down the steps, we found neither Donovan nor the detectives.