Split Code: Dolly and the Nanny Bird

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Which was odd.

  A voice said, ‘This is the Captain. May I speak with Mrs Warr Beckenstaff, if you please?’

  I put my hand over the telephone and said, ‘It’s the captain. Mrs Warr Beckenstaff, we’re sailing.’

  ‘So I see,’ Ingmar said. ‘Give me the telephone.’ The door closed behind the public relations man and she spoke into the phone briefly, in German. She put the receiver down and I replaced the phone on the desk. ‘You don’t understand German,’ she said. Beyond the pink swagged door, the ship’s tannoy could just be heard, making a booming announcement. I thought of all the sleepers it would wake up, and of all the people, like the Eisenkopps, who were spending the afternoon at an hotel, and would return to the quay to find the Glycera absent.

  I said, ‘No. I don’t understand German. Why are we sailing?’

  ‘To sever our connection with the land,’ said Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff, seating herself at her desk, and drawing pen and paper towards her. ‘You had better go, and send in my secretary.

  Fortunately, press and photographers are on board and, of course, all the European guests who joined us at Venice.’

  She was writing. ‘Mrs Warr Beckenstaff,’ I said, ‘I have to get back to the baby. Why are we sailing?’

  She half looked up. ‘Ah, the baby,’ she said. ‘He has been vaccinated, I should hope?’

  Beneath my chaste lilac uniform, like a crab from its shell, the bottom fell out of my stomach. ‘Oh heavens,’ I said. ‘It isn’t smallpox?’

  ‘Ah, passion at last,’ she said, writing firmly. ‘Yes: an outbreak of smallpox was announced by Belgrade late this morning. Confined, they believe, to the Dubrovnik region, but we shall move out of the seaway for safety. No one comes aboard except in emergency, and unless he or she has been vaccinated. No one leaving the ship for the danger area will be permitted to come aboard a second time. The news reached the airport, I am told, just after our plane arrived and many if not all of the passengers are waiting there to take the next scheduled flight home. You didn’t hear an announcement?’

  ‘We left by car, before the others did. Mrs Warr Beckenstaff...'

  She put down her pen with a crack. ‘I am aware of your problem. It is minor. We shall make a temporary stop off Ploče to allow a launch to return you to the Dolly. I see no difficulty, provided the Dolly remains at sea, and all those on board have been vaccinated. You will be safer than before, it seems to me. The militia have cordoned the area.’

  I couldn’t get on deck then quickly enough. Johnson was hanging over the port side, his hair mixed up with his spectacles, watching the noisy approach of a launch full of luggage and people. Among them were the black and blonde heads and cashmere sports casuals of Comer and Beverley Eisenkopp.

  Unlike the faces round about us, Johnson’s was stamped with neither excitement nor horror. He listened with attention to all I told him of my visit to Ingmar and at the end said only, ‘She’s right. I could do without the Glycera wandering about, but in a way, the cordon makes our job easier. It’s almost bound to force the other side into a change of plan, and that always leaves room for errors. The other thing is the health hazard. Are you worried?’

  Below, the launch had reached the foot of the companionway, and the captain and the chief officer had appeared there. No one had come aboard.

  I said, ‘Ben is protected, and I’m all right. What about you and Lenny?’

  ‘I’m a permanent walking chemical factory,’ Johnson said. ‘And I know Donovan is all right, and his invisible comrades. It’s a mild outbreak. I gather the vaccinated can walk about anywhere so long as they have the right papers. And that’s what the said other side are going to find awkward. I only hope, after this, the poor sods aren’t moved to abandon the kidnap.’

  ‘Surely not,’ I said. Pained.

  The shouting below had risen in volume. Craning over, we could see the wind lifting Comer’s creamed hair, and hear the despairing twang of Beverley’s accent. I said, ‘Comer’s against vaccination as a matter of principle.’

  ‘Ain’t that a bitch?’ said Johnson sympathetically. ‘Then he’s going to miss out on the Warr Beckenstaff gala. What do you think they’ve done with Bunty and the two Eisenkinder?’

  ‘Sent them on to Herceg-Novi,’ I said. I tried very hard to keep the laughter out of my voice. ‘Bunty’s vaccinated, you see. And when we were in Cape Cod, she got Dr Gibbings to do the kids without telling Comer.’

  It was as well she did. The car, clearly, had been allowed to proceed to the seaside, and the Eisenkopps had had to return to plague-ridden Dubrovnik, to see the Glycera majestically sailing out of the harbour. No wonder they were clean out of alphas. I said, ‘I ought to get back to Benedict. I could take that launch. But I don’t want the Eisenkopps on Dolly.’

  ‘I don’t imagine you’ll get them on Dolly,’ said Johnson placidly. ‘I’ll come with you, if you like, to dissuade them. But if I know Comer, he’ll take the first plane back to health, hygiene and sanity, and force Beverley and the kids to go along with him.’

  But he didn’t. By the time Johnson and I boarded the launch it was empty of all but the rejected Eisenkopps and a number of tight-lipped representatives of the Warr Beckenstaff Corporation. The Booker-Readmans, if appealed to, had clearly not come to the rescue. Neither had Ingmar herself although Dr Gibbings, looking hurt, turned on his heel as we arrived and walked away from the head of the gangway. Comer said, his voice hoarse with declaiming, ‘I’m glad to see two folks with sense. You’re gonna fly the kid out of the God-damned country.’

  The launch’s engine started up and Johnson sat down, and so did I. Beverley said, ‘Are they hell going to fly the kid out of the country; Benedict’s vaccinated; right?’ to me.

  I nodded. ‘I’m staying with him on Dolly. It’s only a mild outbreak, Mr Eisenkopp, and the health authorities haven’t advised tourists to leave. I’m sure the children will be fine in Herceg-Novi.’

  ‘A bunch of gollies,’ Comer Eisenkopp said. ‘Some crap bunch of gollies on a coach tour to Meccaland, wouldn’t you know it? And back they come with the plague. A hell of a mother my kids have got. She’s left them down there with a girl that’s pumped their guts fulla cow shit. A klutz. I’da bust her. I’da slung her out on her ass but their Mom here - oh, no. Herceg-Novi’s not infected. Hell, Dubrovnik wasn’t infected yesterday. Today like as not the bugs are right there in your belly, shoulder to shoulder and doin’ a circle jerk. Ya know what she wants to do?’

  The rope came inboard and we began to move away from the Glycera. Togetherness had melted from the Eisenkopp prospectus. Comer jerked a thumb at his wife. ‘She wants to get herself shot full of cow shit and go to the party.’

  I’d guessed that much. I also wondered how much she had paid in advance for her holiday course of plastic surgery. This time Johnson said, ‘I think it’s been pretty well proved that vaccination saves lives, Mr Eisenkopp. But if you don’t fancy it, why not leave your wife with us? We’ll see she gets her scrape, and I’ll take her back to the Glycera. Then later on, she and the children can have a good holiday. Why, you might even feel like coming back in a few days and joining them.’ He was a rat. I could feel Beverley stiffen at the prospect of bewitching her husband, all black eyes and skin-pink elastoplast. Comer said, ‘I’ve got a business to run. I can’t do my head in like some guys in the play scene. Bev? You heard what he said.’

  ‘I want to get vaccinated,’ Beverley said. Her gorgeous face was blotchy with crying and temper, and strands of hair flew from her bandana. Her small, pretty hands were clenched so hard her rings were grinding together.

  Comer said, ‘I reckon you mean to get your money’s worth outta that costoom. And the beauty box. You know there’s a white leather gift box in every cabin, fitted out with Ingmar’s products in silver-topped crystal bottles, all lined with pink plush? The men get somethin’ too. Sprayed with hormones, I guess. You’ll look real good, honey, in spots.’

  We had arrived at th
e jetty. ‘You’re no gentleman, Comer Eisenkopp,’ said his wife in a low-pitched, vehement voice. ‘Mr Johnson, I thank you for your offer. Good-bye, Comer.’

  She jumped ashore. For a moment, Comer Eisenkopp looked nonplussed. Then without a word, he strode on to the pier and made for a taxi, without waiting for his cases. The seamen began to lift them out and they stood in two matched sets beside us: his and hers, in leather-bound tapestry. A taxi containing Comer ambled across, absorbed one pile and vanished on the road to the airport. There were no farewells.

  Johnson turned from the sea where Dolly, distantly swinging, disclosed the presence of Lenny with binoculars in the cockpit and Donovan lying stripped to the waist on the coachroof. They both waved, lazily. No cries floated over the water.

  Her owner grinned down at his new companion. ‘Honey,’ said Johnson, who was no gentleman either, ‘you would look real good in anything. Come on and let’s find a cow-doctor.’

  Johnson parked behind the north walls. From the highway above, Dubrovnik looks like a toy city packed in a matchbox, with a bite out of one end for the harbour. Of the two longer sides, one is built on the sea-rocks and the other crosses the peninsula neck under the shadow of wooded Mount Srdj. The city gates, once with their moats and their drawbridges, lie at either end of the matchbox; and the Placa, the broad main street which runs from the one gate to the other, is sunk like the floor of a boat, so that all the long streets on either side slope or step sharply down to it. The walls are seventy-two feet high and eighteen feet thick in some places. Dubrovnik, old name Ragusa, was a rich city state for four hundred years, trading like Venice with the Orient. It had a lot to protect.

  It still had a lot to protect, and the enemy this time wasn’t corsairs. Twenty-three thousand other people besides Beverley Eisenkopp wanted to be vaccinated, quickly, and it was clear long before Johnson slid into the Put Iza Grada car park that if Beverley was ever to grace the Ingmar anniversary celebration that evening, she was going to have to have the personal favour of St Blaise, short of discovering a reliable but corrupt member of the Yugoslav nationalized health service.

  Clear to me, that is. Beverley had already remembered what I had forgotten and Johnson wasn’t supposed to know about. As Johnson got out of the car she said, ‘Now look at that view. Why don’t you go up on the walls, J.J., and have yourself a nice walk while Nurse Joanna and I go and get this little business looked after? There’s a real nice statue down there, you can’t miss it; we could meet up with you there in half an hour?’

  Johnson said. ‘Half an hour? Are you sure?’ There were queues everywhere.

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Beverley. The pinched look had gone out of her face and she tossed her Wig ‘n Lift off her shoulders for Johnson’s benefit. ‘Anyways, Nurse Joanna can come and tell you if I’m held up.’

  I telegraphed to Johnson, I’ve got to get back to the baby, and he replied with a flash of his glasses: Don’t miss the chance to find out where she is going. In spite of all that, I said aloud, ‘Can Lenny manage?’

  ‘Of course he can,’ said Johnson calmly. ‘First sign of senility, when you think you’re indispensable. Run along, both of you.’

  And so we ran. Through the modern gateway, down the steps and the landings of the nearest plunging street and right along the Ulica Prijeka to a tall, crumbling seventeenth-century building with a wide, handsome door and brass plate. The Radoslav Clinic, naturally. Where Beverley was to have her plastic pick-up in three days from now, and the medics all knew her.

  She said, ringing the bell, ‘I daresay Bunty has told you about this place. I guess there isn’t much about my private life you don’t know between you by this time. Maybe it seems weird to you, but you’d be surprised just how many big English names you’ll see getting their image fixed up. And all those Japanese eyelids. You wanna come in?’

  Nothing, really, would have kept me out.

  Inside there was a black and white floor and a fountain, and a doorway leading into a patio with a pool and palm trees and wistaria, and a number of lemon trees in small tubs. There was also a queue, stretching three times round the hall and then out of sight up a staircase, of women in black skirts and headscarves, and men in thin dark suits and black berets, their collarless shirts displaying necklines of pristine white underwear. They were undoubtedly not there to have their chins lifted.

  A nurse in white canvas boots and a blue overall came out of an office and there was a sharp exchange, in the middle of which Beverley wheeled round and pushing past the patient crocodile, began to make her way up the stairs. The nurse looked after her without attempting to follow, sighed and then, picking up a half- smoked cigarette, turned her large dark eyes on me. One of her sleeves had been taped up to uncover a new vaccination. ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘You’ve cancelled the cosmetic surgery programme?’

  Her English was perfectly adequate. ‘Is it not reasonable?’ she said. ‘The risk of infection. And all, all our doctors will be needed for many days for all these poor people. We will open again. Your friend will come back.’

  ‘The lady is my employer,’ I said, also with a sigh but smiling as well. ‘I am a nurse also. I look after the lady’s two children.’

  Well, I did, on occasion. And it brought me a seat in the office and a bowl of thick Turkish coffee. While my hostess said ‘Molim?’ continuously through her cigarette into the telephone and Beverley jumped the queue, or failed to, for her vaccination.

  Half an hour later I had seen over the clinic, inspected, with suppressed hysteria, the signed thank-you photographs in the doctors’ private sitting-room and located Beverley Eisenkopp, roughly two hundred and fifteenth in the double line of those waiting to be vaccinated, and weeping with rage. Equality, it seemed, meant equality; and if they lost that Eisenkopp overhaul business for the rest of their lives, they still weren’t willing to oblige her.

  I was on my way out to tell Johnson when this white-coated young doctor stopped me. Tall and brown, as most of the citizens were, with humorous brown eyes strongly under-lidded, and a slender nose with flattened high cheekbones. He said, without removing his cigarette, ‘The nurse tells me you are Mrs Eisenkopp’s nanny, so perhaps you are Bunty?’

  Who would have thought it? I produced my most candid expression. ‘Well, she was nearly right. My employer is a friend of Mrs Eisenkopp and I know Bunty very well. But my name’s Joanna Emerson. Why? Do you know Bunty?’

  I knew the answer just before he came out with it. ‘Ah, a great deal,’ he said. ‘But by name only, for I hear so much about her, and about you. It is you who have the aunt in Canada, is it not? For you see . . .

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘You’re Jesus Krysztof?’

  Charlotte’s boyfriend. As it happened, he wasn’t. He was the other one.

  ‘Lazar Dogíc,’ he said. His lids bunched with glee, and also against the clouds of grey smoke from his filter-fag. ‘Our names are difficult. Charlotte has much fun with mine. How is she; is she well? She is not with you?’

  I explained. I further explained about Mrs Eisenkopp. He knew all about her cancelled operation but not about her urgent desire to be vaccinated. In two minutes, equality had acquired a slight bend, and the American lady had been slipped from the queue by another nurse with laced boots with no toes and heels.

  I followed. We were led to a neat room with clean parquet flooring where a trolley already stood by an armchair. While Lazar Dogi’c administered the vaccine, I waited outside and tried to guess from the dialogue where he had punctured her.

  Wherever it was, it made Dr Dogíc’s day: his fresh cigarette had dimples all round it when he eventually emerged. Beverley herself was rather blotched, and a line had sneaked out from the Wig ‘n Lift and landed between her arched eyebrows. At the same time, you couldn’t say she was mournful, either over the smallpox or Comer. It turned out that it was Dr Dogíc’s birthday, and Beverley had asked him to join us and Johnson in a drink. We all sallied forth to find the square, the st
atue and Johnson.

  I remember at that point feeling momentarily free. I trusted Lenny with Ben. I believed Johnson when he said that the baby and I ran no danger when we were separate. I ought, no doubt, to be making a valuable study of my companions but my companions were getting along perfectly well together and had been here before and were going to be here again, and I wasn’t.

  Fate, or the Department, or Johnson had brought me to this medieval city state without traffic, and I wanted to rubberneck. To drift with others along its main street, paved with brilliant white marble like parquet. To lift my eyes to the handsome stone buildings with their red pantile roofs and rows of green swallow-tailed shutters. To linger in front of each arch of the knee shops, door and window and counter in one, which for three hundred years had formed each side of the street into a range of mysterious caverns.

  Too quickly we reached the square at the end, surrounded by Renaissance and Gothic arched palaces and containing a freestanding pillar with the real nice statue of a longhaired knight with sword and shield in its niche.

  Johnson wasn’t behind the shield or sitting on the steps on the other side of the column, unless he had been flattened by the five hundred odd people who were standing there instead, their backs to us. Beverley said, ‘What’s going on? Are they running a sweepstake?’ as she picked her way like the rest of us over a carpet of pigeons.

  Charlotte’s boyfriend said, ‘No, they are watching the weddings. You see in front of you the Municipal Palace. There. Beside the belfry and the small fountain. And someone waves to you, perhaps your friend, from the Gradska Kafana? The City Café? On the terrace there?’

  It was Johnson. But I wasn’t looking at Johnson. Below the white balustrades of the City Café, and smothered bonnets, radiators, windows and boots with mixed flowers and greenery, were parked five desecrating automobiles. As we stared, a discreet croak behind us scattered first the pigeons and then the crowds to admit a sixth car which also halted in front of the Palace.