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

by Dorothy Dunnett

  It wasn’t the police. It was the voice of the grey-haired man who had threatened to have Di assaulted. Di said, jeeringly, ‘You’d better open up, hadn’t you?’

  Maybe she thought it was the police. Maybe Innes himself wasn’t sure if it might be a trick. In any case, he didn’t at once let his friends in. He backed, bag and gun in his hands, to the window, edged a shutter open with a jerk of his elbow and peered outside.

  A shot smashed the glass and sang into the room, ending its life in the base of the Incubator. Innes inserted his gun in the hole and fired back instantly.

  ‘Innes,’ said Johnson gently.

  The Dardick, smoking, swung around and trained on Johnson before he had stopped speaking. ‘Your friends won’t get in,’ said Innes firmly. ‘You may as well get used to the idea. You’re beaten, Johnson.’ Another burst of fire came from outside the building and he swung around to the window, pressing the trigger. A figure in a dark jersey and trousers appeared for a moment, illuminated by the light from the window, and dived into the bushes, firing. Innes fired back three more shots. I said, rather slowly, ‘That was Dimitri.’

  ‘The bastard,’ said Innes feelingly. He looked back at Johnson. ‘How many more of your chums are waiting outside there, eh? Six? Twelve? By God, I’ll give them a run for their money.’ Giorgio, looming into his sights, took a quick potshot and raced out of them, followed by a hail of Dardick bullets from Innes.

  I said, ‘Innes. They’re on your side.’

  ‘My side?’ said Innes, laughing gratingly. ‘They’re on the side of your friend Johnson. D’you know how I got here tonight? I followed Lenny. He knew where to come.’

  ‘You should have asked him whom he was following,’ said Johnson mildly. ‘Innes, whom do you work for?’

  ‘Who?’ said Innes. He fired off three more shots. I reckoned it made twelve altogether.

  ‘Whom,’ said Diana. The grey-haired man appeared, calling something, and Innes fired another shot, followed by a second. Someone battered at the door and he loosed off two more. The second time the gun only clicked.

  ‘He works for the American security service. Don’t you, Innes?’ Diana said. ‘Open the door, darling. We don’t want anyone hurt.’

  Innes turned, bag in one hand and Dardick uselessly in the other, and Diana looked at him smiling, a little gun perched in her fingers. The one we had seen her lose in the Dome when they pounced on her. ‘I’ll take the bag,’ she said, and held her hand out to Innes.

  Innes produced a number of very pale think-bubbles and looked at her. I looked at her too, but I was mainly concerned with watching Johnson. He was standing where he had first taken his stance with his back to the Incubator, and the way he was looking at Di was neither staggered nor baleful, but just mildly satisfied. The banging on the door increased and Di, letting drop a swearword which made even Johnson blink, backed and opened the door, keeping the gun trained with profound expertise straight upon us.

  The grey-haired man walked quickly in, followed by three of his henchmen, the last of whom barred the door quickly. Spreading out, guns in hands, Giorgio, Dimitri and Pietro manned the windows. The grey-haired man, also gun in hand, turned to Di and said in Italian, ‘What the hell took you so long? Have you got it?’

  ‘In the bag,’ said Di calmly. Still keeping us covered, she gave him the packet of Cuddle. He kneaded it.

  ‘The girl cut it to shreds. You will have to piece it together,’ said Di prosaically. Other than making sure she could kill us if necessary, she gave us no more of her valuable attention.

  She was always a clever bitch, with the brightest attributes of both her nations. Only Innes, staring at Johnson, seemed to be totally at a loss. Johnson smiled at him. ‘Let me introduce you,’ he said to Innes mildly. ‘Miss Diana Minicucci and her father, His Highness the Prince. Are you really one of Joe Grady’s roving scientists?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Innes. He looked very shocked. I wondered if he really was an American agent, and decided that if Johnson said so, he probably was. Johnson said, ‘Congratulations. Was it your two thugs then who gave Ruth the going-over in Ischia?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Innes defensively. He turned to me. ‘I have to explain that.’

  ‘Not now,’ said Johnson. ‘After they examine the contents of that bag, you realize, they are going to shoot us.’

  ‘Ruth and me,’ said Innes gravely. ‘I expect that.’

  ‘And Mr Johnson,’ said Prince Minicucci, lifting his handsome grey head from the Cuddle bag. ‘Since introductions are in order, perhaps I should make you known to one another? Dr Wye, Mr Johnson is a member of British Intelligence. If you hadn’t stopped him just now, he would have been safely in the Villa Sansavino with Miss Russell. A basin, Diana.’

  Which was a pity. Because when she brought it and he up-ended the Cuddle, there were no strips of negatives in it. They left Dimitri at the window and they all came and stood looking at me – all except Diana, who kept her lashes and her revolver unwaveringly on my friend Johnson. Johnson said, ‘Ruth, you deserve the British Empire Medal and I shall worship you forever, but don’t confuse anybody any longer. Tell them where the photographs are.’

  ‘And then they shoot us,’ I said.

  A voice in the distance, speaking first in Italian and then in English said, ‘We know you are inside. If you open the door and come out, unarmed, with your hands resting on your heads, we will spare your lives. Otherwise we shall blow the door down.’

  ‘And then,’ said Johnson, ‘they can use us as hostages. Go on.’

  The voice outside began painstakingly all over again. ‘We know you are inside . . .’

  Prince Minicucci walked to the window. Through the crack in the shutters we could all see the floodlights: lights surrounding Mouse Hall in its entirety, and shining on uniformed heads and the long barrels of rifles. It reminded me of the day the Chief of Police discovered he had been riding for half an hour in the same limousine as a gas balloon. Diana’s father cupped his hands and called in Italian, ‘We have here Mr Johnson, Dr Wye and Miss Russell. We demand to leave this building and quit the country without molestation. Otherwise they shall all die.’

  ‘I am afraid Miss Russell,’ said Di, ‘is going to perish before anyone if she doesn’t hand over that film roll. Don’t be mad, darling. It is here, isn’t it?’

  She looked at me as she had always done, cool, superior, vaguely friendly, with no evil intentions towards anyone so long as they didn’t interfere with her creature comforts. I said, ‘Yes, it’s here. Behind the power cables. I put it there that day Johnson and Jacko and I unmanned the Incubator.’

  It was true, this time. If they shone a light where I pointed they would find it: the original film from the Zeiss Icarex, tucked in behind the hank of 2000-volt cable that festooned the three walls of Mouse Hall. I had put it there when Johnson had switched the power off on that one day we all came to search here. Unless someone switched the power off again, it could not be removed.

  Johnson had searched for it, and perhaps seen it, but if he had removed it, every one of Innes’s instruments would have recorded it. And Innes himself, of course, was the last person to switch off the power, even if he had dreamed of anyone choosing his private locked Hall as a hiding place. Outside, someone with a loudspeaker said, ‘You are invited to come out unarmed, with your hands resting on top of your heads. Provided the three people you mention are quite unharmed, I promise a cease-fire immediately.’

  The Prince said, ‘They will use tear gas. Close the shutters. Dr Wye, I desire a battery spotlight . . . Dear sir, why should I hesitate to shoot one of you now? Ah, that is wise.’

  He switched on the light Innes had given him. ‘Now, Diana.’ And Di, bending, turned off the power.

  All the machines, as once before, fell totally silent. Outside, the voices of the polizia could be heard very clearly; inside you were aware of heavy breathing, and the half-lit circle of faces, intent and sweating like a Rembrandt etching at Sotheby’s.
Minicucci walked out of the circle.

  He was a short man, and the bank of instruments made it awkward to reach to the cable. He looked around for a stool and, finding one, pulled it over and climbed upon it.

  Even Di watched him. That was how she failed to see Johnson lash out and kick over the battery lamp. One moment we were there, isolated in our pool of light and our silence. The next, darkness fell, and bloody chaos.

  Someone fired a shot and someone shouted. Someone started a scuffle and someone, raising his voice, ordered Giorgio and Pietro to stand guard at the door. A voice outside, self-consciously sonorous, said, ‘Unless by the count of twenty you emerge unarmed from your doorway, we shall with regret have to make use of both gas and explosives.’ Prince Minicucci’s voice, clear and final, said, ‘Diana. Put on the power.’

  The arc lamps of Mouse Hall, blinding, dazzled us. They shone on Innes, astride Dimitri and thumping him, and Pietro, ceasing abashed to attack Giorgio, who continued punching. They shone on Diana standing still by the switch and wringing her hand, from which I had just twisted her revolver. They shone on Prince Minicucci, still and straight-backed and triumphant on his flat stool-top, bearing in his right hand the roll of film which would make him welcome, I supposed, in whatever country he intended to end up in. And they showed Johnson, standing in the spot from which he had only once moved, by the Incubator. Only the white blocks of the Incubator were all tumbled askew and in Johnson’s hands, and pointed at Minicucci’s breast was the red laser. ‘Thank you, Diana,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you will join your father and Pietro and Giorgio. Innes, you might release Dimitri and relieve Ruth of the gun. Minicucci, I’ll have that film, please.’

  ‘Will you?’ said Prince Minicucci. He looked with distaste at Johnson and at his laser. Then, with a flick of his thumb, he sent the film flying, to flash and sizzle to nothing in the mesh of cables over his head. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Some of the evidence has disappeared.’

  I didn’t know what I felt. I dared not look at Innes who, with Diana and the three men to cover, had no time for Johnson’s affairs. Minicucci, still under the threat of the laser, was descending with care from his stool. It was only then that I remembered Professor Hathaway saying something about Minicucci’s laboratories.

  If he had laboratories he would know, as Innes did and I did, that the red laser used in our astronomy is utterly and totally harmless.

  He did know. He reached the ground, paused, and without warning dived for Johnson.

  And Johnson, miraculously, was expecting him. Instead of becoming a shield for Minicucci he sidestepped and, swinging the gun like a club, cracked it across the Prince’s fine, tailored shoulders and then caught him under the chin. Innes fired. The Prince staggered, grunted, dropped and rolled over.

  Diana didn’t run to him. Maybe she saw he was dead. Maybe she didn’t care anyway. Maybe her wits were sharper, on the whole, than her father’s. She didn’t utter a sound. Instead, she hurled herself on the floor and flung the power off again.

  We were girl against girl and three men against two. I couldn’t fight Diana, although you could tell where she was by her Le Galion. I couldn’t even help Innes and Johnson: among the fighting, buffeting bodies it was impossible to make out anything but, occasionally, Innes’s aftershave. Soon, the police were going to shoot the locks off and burst in on us, firing. Soon, someone else was going to be killed, and I didn’t want it to be me or Innes or Johnson.

  I knew what I had to do, and it seemed a pity I couldn’t warn anyone, but it took all my energy to reach the side of the room where the crank was. Then I fitted it into its socket and, toiling, rolled back the roof of the workshop.

  A yellow glare from the sky split the darkness. For a moment, the struggle slackened, and then with fresh vigour renewed itself. Even if Diana and her friends realized what was happening, they were far too busy to track down the mechanism. The ratchets ground and rumbled like a trailer going over a cattle grid. I hoped the police outside would notice it.

  They did. I had cranked the roof a yard back when the first gas bomb arched through the opening, and I went on cranking until three more came and burst on the Incubator. Then I did my best to crank it shut again, to keep in the full body and flavour. I got within a foot or two as well before I had to give up, coughing and retching, by which time the police had the door broken.

  Inside they found no opposition. Only seven very sorry people, and a mouse that had died in the course of its duty.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘I propose,’ Johnson said after the police had gone, ‘an Anglo-American funeral with full military honours, and crossed Cuddle bags on the gun carriage. Hard cheese, Innes.

  ‘A little flower, lent not given,

  To bud on earth and bloom in heaven.’

  ‘I only kept her for amusement,’ said Innes stiffly. ‘I am a scientist, you know. I assist my country on occasion, but I am expected to place my own work first.’

  He had been apologizing ever since we arrived at Maurice’s, which we did about midnight, leaving Di and our complete personal histories in the hands of the police. The first thing they had done was advise Naples and the Villa Sansavino that we were alive, which pleased Maurice and Timothy and Professor Hathaway and Jacko, who had just arrived there, having been told quite simply by Diana that I had fallen overboard and Johnson had drowned trying to save me.

  They had remained in Naples all afternoon while the police and harbour people were looking for us. Charles and Innes and Lenny had reacted differently. Lenny, following a hunch, he said, of Maurice’s, had followed Di when she left the others in Naples, saying she wished to avoid the photographers. And Innes, convinced that Johnson and his friends were the villains, had followed Lenny, to whom, in fact, we owed the arrival of the police at the observatory.

  Charles hadn’t followed anybody. Charles, knowing who Johnson was, had discerned a dark plot to kidnap me and wrest from me the supposed hiding place of the film and had lit out wildly for Rome, driving up one-way streets and plunging through yellow-taxi lines until finally he ended up in the British Embassy, begging them to put the Prime Minister on to finding me.

  By that time we were at the Questura, making our statements. The moment when Charles burst in and collected me in a grip like a waffle iron was not one I am likely to forget. After years of cackling at moonlight on water he went completely to pieces and cried into my Capri cruising wear while I patted his shoulder. Innes went bright pink and went away for the fourth time to phone the American Embassy while Johnson stayed right there, enjoying it. Even now, sitting in Maurice’s study with one of Professor Hathaway’s Tricosa cardigans over my shoulders, I was wearing more of Charles than another single garment. I didn’t expect to be kidnapped again, but it was reassuring all the same.

  Everything was reassuring: the meal we had had at the Trattoria Sinigaglia in Parassio, where Charles announced he would discard me if I did not at once renounce my diet, and where we had pork stuffed with rosemary and garlic and litres and litres and litres of Castelli wine in tall waisted jugs with glass seals and no handles. I discarded my diet. Worry can do more for you any day, dimagrante-wise.

  It was reassuring to be welcomed into the villa by Timothy, even if he did pour coffee for Charles and Johnson, bending over the silver, lightly sunkissed by Sicilian skies, before bringing me mine.

  It was nice to be squashed by Jacko and receive a hirsute kiss fragrant with seafaring aromas. It was unexpectedly disconcerting to receive a dry embrace and a touch on the hair from Professor Hathaway who saw, withdrawing, the drip on my chin and dispersed it. ‘Early to bed,’ said my Director with some briskness. ‘You’ve done very well. Early to bed. don’t you think, Johnson?’

  The time being midnight, the suggestion was more well-intentioned than practical, particularly as Johnson seemed to be for some reason included in the programme. Johnson himself paid no attention, being occupied in filling his unpleasant pipe and lighting it. He had found another pair of bifo
cal glasses and had changed his seagoing gear for a Clydella shirt and cable-stitch pullover. Seated on the base of his spine he was thus immune to the frequent glances of Innes, who had not changed at all and whose kipper tie was blotched with blood and tears and spit from the polizia’s gas bombs. At length Innes said, ‘Must you?’

  Johnson, Professor Hathaway and Maurice himself all paused in the act of striking fresh matches and gazed at him. I was reminded of something. ‘Maurice,’ I said. ‘I owe you an apology. At one point this evening I had nasty thoughts about you.’

  ‘How delightful,’ Maurice said, puffing out Havana smoke forgetfully in the direction of Innes and smiling with that particular silvery sweetness which has endeared him to generations of nubile young visitors. ‘How delightful to be sixty and still have nasty thoughts entertained about one. Unquestioning adoration is only for the angels, and so are all the boring sorts of devotion. I know you thought me guilty, and I am pleased by it. Innes, on the other hand, is offering you sugar and will shortly give you a brandy because he is overcompensating. He thought you were guilty, and is now ashamed of it.’

  ‘Innes! Did you?’ I said, fascinated. A shower of demerara sugar slid down the Tricosa cardigan as Innes knocked the spoon sideways. He put the bowl down crossly and took his seat between Johnson’s pipe and Professor Hathaway’s Manikin. He said, ‘When the cameras became so suspiciously mixed, yes. And your presence at the Fall Fair was unexpected.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ I said, mildly astonished. ‘It was in my balloon after all. We wondered, come to that, what you were doing at it. How, by the way are your calluses?’

  Innes looked bemused.

  ‘She means, How are your Trappists?’ said Johnson kindly. ‘Don’t listen to her, she will only confuse you. Innes was at the Fall Fair, Ruth, because he had offered to help track down some rather worrying leaks from our brave nuclear physicist boys in the Parassio Institute. Everyone felt he had spotted the gentleman responsible, but no one knew how he was getting the dope passed on to his opposite number. Then it turned out he had this nineteen-three Baedeker. . .’