Ibiza Surprise

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘They’ve been stolen,’ said Mr Lloyd. He paid no attention to Janey. ‘Another collar, a copy from God knows where this time, has been put on the statue. There was a fight on the float, and we all followed a man here. You didn’t see him?’

  ‘Here?’ said Austin. He put down the sherry bottle. ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘He was dressed in a hood,’ said Mr Lloyd, staring at Austin. ‘You didn’t see or hear anyone?’

  ‘No!’ said Austin blankly. He took a grip of himself. ‘Hell, you can search if you like. In fact, I think that you’d better. If anyone’s hidden in this house, I’d sure like to know it. Do you think he’s still got the rubies?’

  ‘I think it’s likely,’ said Janey’s father. ‘We’ll look for those too. If you’ve no objection?’

  ‘None at all, sir,’ said Austin. He grinned a pale grin. ‘Maybe you’d like to search me as well.’

  And before anyone could stop him, he pulled off his blazer and slung it across to Janey’s father, and then proceeded to turn out every pocket until the linings were showing. He had beautiful Swiss handkerchiefs, a croc wallet and handfuls of pesetas, and bennies, plus a key ring with a very authentic- looking scarab attached. There was nowhere else he could have carried anything so large as that collar.

  Mr Lloyd got a bit red and said: ‘There was no need for that, Mandleberg, but it was very decent of you to do it. Gil, come on.’

  Half the room emptied. One or two people began crawling around the gallery itself, and Austin, after some hesitation, packed the stuff back into his pockets and got into his blazer.

  Janey said: ‘Well? We’re waiting for the rest of those sherries,’ and he smiled at her and began pouring again.

  A voice behind me said: ‘She-she,’ gently.

  I hate those hoods, and if I hadn’t known it was Johnson, I wouldn’t have let myself be drawn gently backwards and halfway down the stairs.

  ‘It’s going rather well, don’t you think?’ he said. I could see the bifocals, flashing behind the slits in his hood. ‘Where’s your brother?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Janey said she saw him at the top of the wall. After the rubies were whipped. How did the dogs. . .’

  ‘Aniseed,’ said Johnson simply. ‘Brilliant, don’t you think? Will you do something for me?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing to do with Derek,’ he said. ‘Would you go down and watch for your mother? She ought to be here about now.’

  ‘Wearing a hood?’ I said acidly.

  I didn’t know what on earth Mummy had to do with all this. I thought of something else too.

  ‘Were you the man who punched the other chap on the float? The chap we’re looking for now?’

  ‘No,’ said Johnson. ‘That’s the other piece in the puzzle. The man who got punched ran in here. The man who punched him must have dodged into a doorway when he saw half the town about to catch up with him, and let us go by. My guess is, he’s here now, too.’

  I said it in the end but don’t think it was because Janey and he were drinking out of the same glass.

  ‘Austin’s got a pink patch on his chin.’

  ‘I know,’ Johnson said. ‘Look. Here’s Lady Forsey.’

  She didn’t have a hood, but she had a bloody mantilla, with a comb and a rose stuck through her urchin grey hair, and a red dress covered with white spotted flounces, slit right up to the knee. She had gorgeous legs; she still has.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ she said. ‘Where’s the action?’

  I said: ‘Oh for heaven’s sake. You didn’t stand watching an Easter procession all dressed up like that?’

  ‘I had the best seat in town,’ Mummy said. ‘The chief of the Guardia Civil is an old friend of mine. The dress was a present.’

  ‘You wear it on Sunday,’ I said. ‘I promise you. The poor old chief must have been sitting in agonies.’

  ‘I hope so, darling,’ said Mummy, admiring her kneecap through the top of the slip. ‘I’ve got a police pass for the rest of the holiday, and I’ve donated the van Costa Trophy for the best turned out Guardia Civil with more than eight children. I smell sherry.’

  ‘In here,’ said Johnson. ‘Sarah, take her in, will you? I’m sure she’d like Mandleberg to show her the exhibition.’

  ‘What, now?’ I said. ‘In that getup?’

  ‘Every colour blends in a garden,’ said Mummy, and striding forward, cocked a hip in the doorway. I edged past the elbows and said: ‘Austin, you remember Mrs van Costa?’

  ‘Of course,’ Austin said. With the ease that all those years and years and years in college always give to Americans, he advanced without blinking once, kissed Mummy’s hand, and, in a voice in which there was only the faintest trace of despair, said: ‘You’re most welcome, ma’am. Would you do me the honour of taking a small glass of sherry?’

  Mummy smiled silently into his eyes, bridging the generation gap like a harpoon from a whaleboat. Her technique hasn’t changed one little bit; in a way I suppose that it’s ageless.

  ‘If it’s manzanilla,’ she said, her eyes still wide open. ‘I hate gluey sherries.’

  It wasn’t manzanilla, of course, hardly anyone stocks it, but he wasn’t thrown in the least. He found and poured her a fino and handed it over, doing a great line on vineyards.

  To my surprise, Mummy listened entranced, and sipping the fino, said: ‘Delightful,’ into his eyes. He tore himself away to give a drink to Gilmore and Mr Lloyd, who had just come back, and one or two hoods who had also wandered in. Mr Lloyd gave the thumbs-down sign to Janey. No man and no rubies.

  Austin said: ‘I don’t know if you all know Mrs van Costa? Why don’t we all sit down? I’m sure you gentlemen would be much more comfortable without that cloth on your heads.’

  ‘But they mustn’t!’ said Mummy. ‘Don’t you know it’s forbidden to unmask before the floats are all back in church? Mr Mandleberg, I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate the splendid work you are doing in placing the creations of these talented boys and girls before the public they deserve. Marshall Cheeseman has long been a close and dear friend of mine, and I have watched his work mature from a minor art to the bagged landscape with chickens, which I see you have hanging there now. I have the honour also of knowing Mackenzie Hall-Bassen since he set up his workshop in New Orleans, and I have seen his art flower into those marvellous shapes: so strong, so virile, so refreshingly clear of the mainstream of current art thought. Mr Mandleberg, you are performing a service to aesthetic man.’

  Austin’s eyes lit up. They really did. He put down his sherry, and advancing, said: ‘Mrs van Costa, I have some things here which even you may not have seen before. There is an example here of what I might call a condition of dynamic equilibrium, a sensory experiment with light waves with induced emotional and intellectual response, which has the organically disturbing function of the greatest discoveries. When you see these items, you know yourself, Mrs van Costa.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Mummy, hitching up her frills and threading her way after him through the banks of exhibits. Her flat bottom waggled.

  ‘As the great Paul Klee once said, “Art does not render the visible, but renders visible.” What is your opinion of the Blaue Reiter school, Mr Mandleberg?’

  She was in her element. It was the stuff that drove Daddy to drink. At my elbow, Johnson’s voice said: ‘Let’s follow.’

  Mr Lloyd had sat down, and Gilmore was picking, moodily, at a canvas covered with nails. The sucking noise of sherry being imbibed reached us from a number of hoods. I walked, with Johnson beside me, down the gallery after Mummy, and Janey came with me.

  ‘It’s Johnson,’ I said, but she didn’t answer. She was looking at one of the man-sized circular boards painted in those stomach-turning concentric bands of bright colour. Bene
ath it, you could see Derek’s shoes, still all stained with seawater from the Salinas harbour.

  I kicked her, and she said, belatedly: ‘Oh? In the hood?’

  Luckily, Johnson didn’t seem to be paying any attention, and we all stopped within earshot of Mummy engaged in putting pressure on the dollar.

  They were standing in front of the board with the rows of round wooden slices, and Austin was telling her the significance of the words stencilled on each. She seemed to understand him. I think she probably did understand him, which is a comfort in a way. I mean, it’s nice to know someone does. He had just moved on to something else and was saying’. . . abandoning figurative painting for a lighter and gayer construction, of piping and mesh. . .’ when Mummy said: ‘Mr Mandleberg?’

  He turned back, still pointing onward.

  ‘Mr Mandleberg,’ said Mummy, ‘the condition of this exhibit seems to have altered a good bit since I last saw it in Boston. Are your people keeping this gallery humidified suitably?’

  ‘Er, no,’ said Austin. He didn’t come back. ‘So close to the sea, Mrs van Costa, there’s no need for that. Certainly, as it travels about from country to country, one cannot always ensure that packing and transport conditions are all that one would make them oneself. Certainly, I always personally inspect the galleries that they go to, and many of them, as you know, are my own. But I regard the risk of a slight deterioration as being part of the price one must pay for bringing this unique and brave exhibition before the philistine world. You wouldn’t have me stop it on that account, Mrs van Costa?’

  ‘Why no,’ said Mummy. ‘But I think your wooden framework would repay watching.’ She put her finger along one of the printed wood slices. ‘Look, there’s a split right along there.”

  I don’t know if she pressed it or if she dug her fingernail in. At any rate, there was a small creak. Then, slowly, in front of our eyes, the wooden boss swung smoothly open, revealing, nesting inside, a massive piece of brand new machinery, with the name schuytstraat-amsterdam printed on it.

  ‘Now that,’ said Mummy, ‘is a Happening, if you like.’

  I think for the moment he thought she’d done it by accident. I think perhaps he even thought he might get away with it, if the woman was stupid enough. He just didn’t know Mummy. While Austin was saying:’. . . not unlike Mitchell’s work: petal shapes cut out from boilers and tank ends . . .’ she just kept on pressing. Three other sections of the exhibit swung open to show other pieces of plant, and by that time Austin had stopped speaking and was at the end of the room, with the gun back in his hand.

  Johnson shoved back his hood.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said mildly. His glasses had got steamed up a little. ‘When you threw your blazer over, we took the bullets out of your gun. We seem to have the aural sensator, so you might as well tell me. Where are the rubies?’

  Austin took a deep breath and let the gun drop.

  He said: ‘I guess, when I saw the machinery, I knew you’d blame me. You’ll just have to believe me. I didn’t know these things were there. How in hell could I know? I’ve been abroad.’

  ‘You were in Holland,’ said Johnson. ‘Just after the machinery was stolen. So was Lord Forsey, as it happened: that’s why Schuytstraat got hold of the wrong end of the stick. We know you didn’t steal them, any more than you were meant to touch those rubies today. Someone else does all that for you, and you simply act as a vehicle to anyone who will pay you enough for your trouble. One, the item is stolen. Two, it’s delivered at once to your gallery. And three, it leaves the country in due course, concealed inside one of your special exhibits.’

  He rapped his knuckles, smiling, against a hoarding studded with glued rope and metal.

  ‘You could carry anything inside these, couldn’t you? Hashish inside the quilts, chemicals in the bagged landscapes, microfilm or documents anywhere.’

  Austin went liver colour.

  ‘All right. That’s it,’ he said, and began to walk forward. ‘I don’t know who you think you are, Mr Johnson, but it’s obvious you don’t know anything of me or my work. Have you any idea what it costs to insure and pack and ship these exhibits from country to country? If I were in need of money, Mr Johnson, as you imply, I should hardly be able to finance an undertaking such as this. As it is. . .’

  He stood face to face with Johnson – a big, clean, indignant man reflected in the bifocal glasses – while Johnson stood unmoving, like a Welsh soprano, the pointed cap clutched under his arm.

  ‘. . . as it is,’ said Austin, ‘my work is philanthropic, Mr Johnson. For the benefit of the whole of mankind. Mrs van Costa, whoever she may be, was right about that. And I cannot permit pure, dumb, low-grade sensationalism to interfere with it or me.’

  ‘Was that,’ said the grating voice of Janey’s father, ‘why you attempted to pass this piece of stolen machinery off just now as a fine work of art?’

  ‘Never mind, Mr Lloyd,’ said Johnson mildly. He hadn’t moved. ‘Spry spent the afternoon rigging a camera. Whatever Mr Mandleberg did when he ran in here this evening will be most fully recorded.’

  ‘Oh, really,’ said Austin. ‘I’m not a schoolboy, you know. And I really doubt whether many portrait painters carry a night camera along with their brushes and a technician to rig it. In any case, where could it. . .’ He stopped.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Johnson. He turned and strolled backward, then pausing, reached up an arm to the Cumulus Cloud with Tartan Travel Case and pulled back a zipper. Held within by an efficient structure of cord, the shining lens of a camera glittered down on us all. Johnson re-zipped it and turned just as Austin, cornered at last, began to run for the door.

  There were quite a lot of people in the room by that time, but he also had a great deal of cover. Austin wheeled and, overturning a heavy, self-coloured canvas, dashed for the protection of a bank of lit double-skin boxes, containing large and significant patterns assembled in washers.

  Gilmore was there. Austin attempted to turn, lashed out at Gil and got a kick which shot him through the double-skin window: the washers poured out like fruit-machine tokens, and Austin, twisting, made off this time and began doubling in and out of the lines of exhibits in the general direction of the door. He had nearly got to the end when a group of hooded men, jumping in at a tangent, neatly cut off his exit.

  He was saved by one of the quilts. Ripped from its moorings, it burst on the struggling men, feathers shooting from every overstuffed symbol. Blinded, hood struggled with hood. Other hoardings rocked and came hammering down, to further the blizzards of feathers. There was a sort of heap of men on the floor. I saw Mr Lloyd sprinting to join it, and then Gilmore. The hump of men zigzagged up, struggling, and overhead, a Bagged Landscape burst. The other works, rocked wildly by buffeting cowl peaks, hardly held out much longer. With a sigh, one by one, punctured as if by bayonet charge, the great bladders died, pouring upon the locked figures a long, sad, steady stream of cold, coloured water. A spray of small plastic ships settled, like locusts, and one of the figures, detaching itself, suddenly rolled to its feet, shedding dolls’ eyes like aniseed balls, and made for the door.

  It was Austin. Janey shrieked. I belted along one narrow passage of oscillating discs of shrill colour, aware, out of the side of my eye, that one of them seemed to be moving. As I ran, I saw it detach itself, a thick eight-foot circle of spiralling yellow and pink, rumbling into deliberate movement. It was making straight for the door. I saw Austin look back once, his eyes white as single-spot dice, before he crashed through the doorway and jumped four at a time down the stairs.

  I couldn’t have reached him in time, but the disc did. It thundered through to the landing and, taking off on the top step, sailed down through the air sideways taking my eyeballs, revolving, along with it. Austin had got to the bottom step when it hit him. and he didn’t even give a cry: just a grunt, as it dr
opped like a lid. He didn’t get up.

  Derek, who had propelled it, stood beside me dusting his hands, with an expression of micro-electronics satisfaction under his dripping wet hair.

  ‘As Paul Klee didn’t say,’ Derek said, ‘art does not render the visible, but renders invisible. Let’s go and pick him up shall we?’

  It took three men to lift off the disc and get Austin back to the room. He groaned as we got him into a chair, and groaned again, a bit more, when he opened his eyes and saw the shambles of his Art in the Round. Johnson tied his hands to the arms of his chair and patted Derek on the back.

  ‘Well done. I don’t suppose you know where he’s hidden the rubies?’

  ‘I’m a stranger here myself,’ said Derek, who still looked as if he had had four gins in a row. It was the first joke I’d ever heard him make, which explains its unremarkable nature.

  ‘Look here,’ said Gilmore.

  We left Austin in the charge of a masked man who turned out to be Spry and walked through the shop to where Gil was kneeling, in front of a block of wood covered with steel wire and cotton reels, labelled ‘Maternity’. From the area of the right hip he twisted a screw and drew out a small drawer concealed in the thickness of wood. Beside me, Austin shook his head and sat up. Everybody craned over.

  ‘What a pity,’ said Johnson. ‘It’s empty.’

  The shout from Austin distracted us from the movement we should have been looking for. Everyone looked round at Mandleberg, who was sitting forward tugging like a mad thing at his hands, shouting amazing Bronx epithets. I saw Mr Lloyd and Gilmore look at one another.

  I don’t suppose anyone really expected the first hiding place they found to be the home of the rubies. The whole collection was presumably honeycombed with secret pockets, large, small, and middling. It was perhaps coincidence or perhaps the fact that, in haste, Austin hadn’t quite rammed home the drawer which caused Gil to spot it. So it seemed to me then. In any case, there was Austin on the verge of a stroke, the veins bulging on his fair, well-scrubbed brow as he howled in a formless outburst of rage and mortification. Johnson came over and slapped him on the face, very neatly, with the flat of his hand.