Split Code: Dolly and the Nanny Bird

by Dorothy Dunnett

  I said to Zorzi, ‘You can sail her now,’ and left the wheel so that, after standing a moment, he had to move quickly to right it. I wondered as I turned for the saloon steps if he would pull me back, but he didn’t. If he and Trifun couldn’t manage her now, they were worse fools even than I thought them.

  Below, the carpet was soaked and the door of the washroom had broken, showing Petar wedged within, his eyes shut, his breathing stertorous. The table had shifted off Donovan’s legs and he lay as he had done all along, breathing quietly. Lenny also seemed quite unharmed. They were, one supposed, the lucky ones.

  I didn’t stay to examine any of them, only looked as I made my way over the rubble as quickly as the heaving of the boat would allow.

  Mihovil lay on the floor beside Donovan’s bunk among the glistening crumbs of the whisky bottle. He had been sick: not a pretty sight. But he was alive. Then I opened the door of the forward stateroom, behind which there was no sound at all.

  Because I had snibbed and stowed away everything, nothing had fallen. And because Benedict’s carrycot had been lashed by each of its handles, it stood still on the floor where I had placed it. And inside, lying half on the side and half on the bottom but enclosed still in his quilted coat with its neat, furry sleeping bag was Benedict asleep, his fine skin blubbered with crying. Across his cheek, thickening where it had bled a little, was a long scratch and a red bruise where he had been thrown against something, perhaps the side of the locker. But that was all. His breathing, almost inaudible, was just as it should be.

  I wondered when he had been hurt, and hoped it was lately, during the squall at the narrows. It was the first time since I had come to care for him that he had been injured or frightened without someone to comfort him. It would have been a comfort for me to waken and lift him, but that would have been selfish. He was best where he was.

  I watched him for quite some time, and then moving slowly got together again the things we should need, he and I, for our stay on the island, however long it was going to be. I did what I could, too, to make Lenny and Donovan a little more comfortable. The other two men I left alone. After a bit, I heard my name called and went out to find the island quite close. There was nothing on it really but a church. I could just make out a huddle of roofs, and a cupola, and a belfry. A man standing on the quayside was waving a lantern and shouting. After a moment he put it down and caught the rope Trifun threw him: I helped them winch Dolly in, and hung tenders over, and sheeted in. Then Zorzi and Trifun stepped ashore, and signed me to wait in the cockpit.

  I must have closed my eyes, for the next thing I knew my cases were at my feet and Trifun was emerging from below, Benedict’s carrycot in his hands. The man from the quayside, my torch in his fist, was walking round Dolly’s deck, inspecting her: as I looked, he bent and tested a shackle. Someone who knew boats at last. Someone, of course who was going to sail Dolly away from the Gulf of Kotor, and back to an anchorage less revealing. With, it seemed, Petar and Mihovil still on board.

  Ben was waking in the cold air. I took the carrycot over from Trifun, and left him to carry the cases ashore. The newcomer left Dolly also and followed. Instead of walking round to the church they both advanced to where Zorzi stood, on the far side of the quay. I walked behind, smiling at Benedict. Then I reached them and looked up.

  At the foot of the quay steps lay a motor launch. ‘We go,’ said Zorzi.

  Through the wan, turgid lens of exhaustion, I stared at him. ‘We were to stay on the island?’ In less than an hour it would be light. Wherever he landed, he would face the police and the road barriers. To leave the island surely was madness.

  And disaster from my point of view. This was the island whose name had been spoken last night for the benefit of all those unseen watchers. Now, away from the microphones of the Dolly, our hiding place was to be altered.

  They pushed me when I hesitated, and I picked up the carrycot and climbed down to the launch.

  The ride to the shore was a short one. My knees gave way, stepping on to the shingle, and I put down the carrycot and sat on a rock while the launch was pushed off, and then the newcomer switched on his engine to pilot her back to the Dolly. Trifun picked up the cases and I stood up and climbed the beach between them both to a clearing in the scrub overhanging the roadway.

  Standing parked with its lights out was an ambulance. The only vehicle, of course, which could drive anywhere at all without being questioned.

  I was put in the back. I couldn’t see who the driver was, but heard the sound of a harsh voice barking in Serbo-Croat at Zorzi. From Zorzi’s tone he was being conciliatory. I was glad someone was chewing him out. but beyond caring too much over what. Ben had started to snuffle. I talked to him, and as he came more awake, lifted him out and had a good look, while I rocked him and talked.

  He was all right. But a crying match wasn’t too far in the future. I couldn’t heat him a bottle but I did have some orange juice made up for this kind of occasion. I rescued it from my bag, and let him see it, and then inserted the teat between his gums. What it is to have all your troubles settled by food. I could remember being hungry. At that precise moment my stomach felt it never wanted to eat again.

  The ambulance doors opened and Zorzi and Trifun climbed in carrying something. Zorzi said, ‘Americans like to use bugs. Tell me where they are.’

  To think, to answer, to keep alert was almost impossible. Behind the stubble of his beard Zorzi looked as bad as I felt, and angry. This was not his idea. I said, ‘None. We don’t need bugs with a bodyguard.’

  That didn’t even raise a sneer. He simply signed to Trifun, and Trifun stepped forward with a bug-alert.

  Benedict resented being separated from his bottle, and anyone passing on that road would have heard it. No one passed. They found nothing on Benedict, nothing in the bags or my clothes, down to my shoes. I let them hold my arms and I didn’t struggle. The door to the ambulance was locked, and there was a third man in the driver’s seat. I had nowhere to run to. And I wasn’t supposed to run anywhere anyway.

  Johnson had told me that a bug-alert would blow it, and it did. They found my small, expensive dental operation and held my jaws open in their dirty hands while they picked at my teeth.

  The bug was in a capped tooth, but it had been planted firmly enough not to come out while I was chewing, and by the time they dragged it out my head was ringing with pain. Nor was my jaw much improved when Zorzi hit it. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Bug on you: no bug on the baby?’

  I didn’t know what they knew. I had to pretend I didn’t know they knew anything. I said, ‘My father is nervous.’

  ‘What?’ said Zorzi.

  I tried again. ‘When I go abroad, my father wants me to be safe.’

  They looked at me. Then from the frosted panel in front came a rapping. The driver spoke, and Zorzi, leaving me, opened the door and climbed out of the ambulance. He took the bug with him.

  He came back five minutes later, and smiling. ‘Your tooth,’ he said. ‘It goes on a journey.’

  Damn.

  The ambulance started up.

  The coast road to Kotor is spectacular. As the sky paled I saw it fitfully above Benedict’s head as he sucked, his eyes fixed on mine, and brought up the air he had swallowed, scented with orange, and then lay, smiling and semaphoring with his arms, while going through his repertoire of noises after each of my sentences. I got an impression of red-roofed villages, and date palms, and vines and magenta judas trees and orange blossom, and porches and balconies covered with windblown creeper and geraniums. The lower hills were green and yellow with scrub and gorse, with chrome-grey scars of rock in between, and cypresses set upright here and there like runes among the bushes. Higher up, as the light strengthened, the mountains looked as artificial as peaks out of papier mâché: wild and serrated and surging, with snow on the top.

  When one is being kidnapped one should pay the greatest attention to the route one is taking. When one is in charge of a baby, one should
never . . . never . . . never allow oneself to fall asleep.

  Benedict slept, and I slept with my arms folded round him. I woke once, and we were still driving along the waterside opposite a walled town of antique, pale yellow buildings, skeined all over the opposite hillside. It occurred to me that it could be Kotor.

  The next time I woke, we were driving on the same side as the town, and looking down on it.

  My eyes stayed open that time, because of the road, which on my side dropped sheer down the mountain. As I looked, the ambulance turned to the right, nearly throwing me out of my seat. It was near enough like being on shipboard again to remind me of the ache in my back and my arms and my shoulders and to make even Benedict’s weight seem oppressive. I laid him still sleeping back in his cot, and planted a foot on either side of it. and held on, as I saw Zorzi and Trifun were doing.

  We climbed the mountain in twenty-five zigzags, with the ambulance engine whining with effort, and the gulf below becoming smaller and more distant at every bend. On the edge of one curve I saw a wind sock. It was true then. I hadn’t believed it.

  After a bit I stopped looking even at that, because my head got too heavy to hold up. I think the others were sleeping that time before I was. Even when the lurching eventually stopped and the wheels turned on to a long, level surface and ran for some time without deviating, I found it an effort to open my eyes, and to turn and peer out of the window.

  I didn’t believe what I saw. but if my brain had been working I would have known it was quite real, even if it was one possibility that Johnson had ruled out of court right from the beginning.

  The ambulance stood on a wide gravel drive lined with bushes. Ahead was a sweep of blue water, culminating in what appeared to be a drawbridge. And at the other end of the drawbridge, catching the pink light of dawn on its stairs, its archways, its battlements and pepperpot towers, was the Mad Ludwig castle from Missy’s Golden American Wonderland. The fortress of Kalk with its moat, which was a whimming place.

  In which the owner, Hugo Panadek was wont to whim, according to Grover.

  SEVENTEEN

  Six and a half hours thereupon dropped out of my life.

  Whether I went to sleep or passed out I shall never know - probably both. I have a vague recollection of being shaken and shouted at.

  Be that as it may, the last recollection I have of that journey is staring out of the ambulance window at Hugo Panadek’s castle. And my next was of waking in bed in my underwear in a darkened room presumably in the same castle, with my luminous watch saying half past midday on the same day.

  I ached. Everywhere my bones touched the bed and everywhere they didn’t I ached, but especially on my jaw and inside my ravaged mouth. I searched for and put on my bedlight.

  In a confused way, I thought to find Zorzi’s red-eyed unshaven face on one side of the bed and Trifun’s on the other. Then I remembered. Zorzi was taking my tooth for a ride. It would please him to know how many men besides Donovan he would be gulling.

  Trifun wasn’t here either. No one was here. Not even Benedict.

  I looked about.

  I was in a large, low-ceilinged room full of shimmer-shag carpet and de Sede, Albrizzi and Sacco furniture, of the kind any millionaire bachelor would want for his love nest.

  Nothing about it reminded me of the Dolly. The bed was a two hundred gallon Love Sleep set in a low velvet dais, with a console of switches strongly reminiscent of Wurlitzer’s Back to School Clearance of Pianos and Organs. I pressed a couple, and panels began to slide about on either side, revealing a library of TV and music cassettes, a stack of back copies of Forum, a jar of Enriched Night Concentrate and a three litre bottle of Joy.

  The contrast was meant, I expect, to be hysterical. I didn’t appreciate it. I was sore, and angry and anxious.

  I was also hungry. Another switch got me a radio, a supply of Tuinal, bennies, acid, joints and assorted rubber goods, a couple of very explicit picture books and a telephone which proved to be disconnected. The next one produced a set of crystal and crockery and a miniature fridge, with a dozen expensive bottles of wine and a tin of Malossol caviar in it. There was a spoon, but no tin-opener, and no corkscrew. Black mark, Hugo Panadek.

  I thought I deserved, as well as needed, a restorative. I got up to see if my legs would work and to find a bathroom, and to look for a corkscrew.

  Of the two doors, one was locked and the other led into a bathroom with a satin and maribou wrap hanging on the back of a chair, beside a shelf of Piz Buin male cosmetics. I stripped and had a sort of mesmerizing warm shower, abdicating from my problems, I found, all too easily. Then I put on a bath towel and opened a few cupboards.

  There was a fifty-foot hose and repair kit for the waterbed but no corkscrew visible. I returned to the bedroom and opened more doors. Hugo’s mistresses were all the wrong size, but I found some white French knickers with lace frills I rather fancied, and a check skirt with a long shirt-tail cardigan. I rubbed my hair dry and combed it, and sat looking at my reflection in the mirror.

  I looked terrible. My eyes had enlarged like a bush baby’s, and my face had all sunk to bone fencing. I was hungry, and alone, and locked in a suite in a mountain top castle with no help that I knew of anywhere at all within reach.

  But no one had molested me, it appeared, so far. I had, if I cared to break the bottles and open the tin with my teeth, some food and drink for a while. I was, after all, still one link in the chain between my father and the Malted Milk Folio, even if the rest of the chain had fallen apart. I could cope.

  But Benedict wasn’t here, and Benedict would be much hungrier than I was. Benedict by now would have missed two whole feeds and no matter who had him now, the journey, the strangers, the handling would have his nervous system tangled like knitting. People don’t realize how small a stomach a young child possesses, or what happens if hours go by without nourishment. And after a while the screaming gets on anyone’s nerves.

  Controlling my own nervous system wasn’t much of a snip at the time either. Fizzy drinks are not the best cure for a wild night at sea, but there was a single bottle of champagne, and no alternative. I climbed back on to the bed, and pressed the fridge button, and got out the champagne and opened it. Then with a glass in my hand, I shoved a cassette in the TV slot and sat drinking and thinking and watching. The TV obediently unfolded at the foot of the bed and announced itself as a replay of the Defeat of the Minnesota Vikings by the Miami Dolphins.

  I didn’t even wait to see if they were playing on land or on water. I switched it off and pressed the only button I hadn’t so far attempted.

  For a moment nothing happened, although I was ready for anything: especially a plate of bacon and eggs on a tray with a glass of orange juice and a jar of English cut marmalade. I emptied my glass and lifted the bottle to pour out another. Then I noticed that the whole of the opposite wall was in process of changing.

  I don’t know what I expected. A cave; a row of men with machine-guns; a heap of mice and bat bones from the Tertiary Age. Someone told me there were twelve different sorts of bats in the Balkans.

  It was quite the reverse. Behind the apparent wall was another one, and fitted into that were ten television screens set in rows, with a counter of knobs just below them. They were all blank.

  For quite a long time I sat looking at them. Then I got out of bed, and carrying bottle and glass, walked to the counter. There I pulled a chair up and sat down.

  At one end was a set of sunk typewriter keys, with a couple of switches beside them. Next to that was a thing like a microphone. And on the right were nine pairs of switches, half labelled pic and half labelled sound. In English.

  I really had nothing to lose. I pressed the first couple and waited.

  If there was meant to be sound, it didn’t function. But I got my picture all right. Into one of the screens there shot a large black and white representation of what appeared to be a set for The Prisoner of Zenda. I could see a flagged floor, and a stone st
aircase sweeping up to the roof, and a wall covered with the decapitated heads of sundry post-Tertiary fauna. There were no actors and no dialogue. I pressed the next pair of buttons.

  Another room full of books, tables, easy chairs and a monumental dressed marble fireplace. Library, in the same play. I pressed buttons 3A and B and got an empty banqueting hall; 4A and B got a bedroom with dust sheets all over it.

  Dust sheets? In a television play?

  But of course, it wasn’t a telly drama. What I was seeing through video cameras was Hugo Panadek’s castle, with three of its public rooms and, as it turned out, five of its bedrooms as it lay empty about me. Empty of sound and even of caretakers, unless somewhere there was a kitchen wing closed off from the cameras.

  Or was it empty? Of the ten screens, only eight were showing pictures. One remained blank, no matter how often I pressed its buttons. The other stood on its own, on a level with my eyes as I sat at the counter, and had no corresponding switches at all.

  Then I remembered the pair on the left of the console. One said Speak and the other said Transmit. I turned them both on.

  There was a click. The screen in front of me lit. Then running in from the right came a line of green computer type print. It went on running, filling the screen, and I sat there, my champagne forgotten, and read it. It said:

  You are beneath the Castle of Kalk. The Croatian Liberation Army has certain demands to make on your father. You will not leave this castle until these demands are met. You are now going to record for us a message for your father. Do you understand? Address the microphone.

  I picked up the microphone, and it shook in my hand. I said: ‘I don’t know what you mean. My father has no money. Mrs Warr Beckenstaff will pay for the baby. Where is the baby? He could die without food.’