The Blue Last
Page 35
“Apricots,” she said. “Their staple food.”
“Diane,” said Melrose, “who in hell are the Hunzas?”
Diane waved the question away with ruby-painted nails. “Some Indian or other. Have we finished our dinner? Am I sitting in the smoking section? I’m way down at the end here, absolutely ostracized.”
“You’ve got me, Diane,” said Jury, taking her lighter to light her cigarette.
“Oh, don’t I wish.”
“Funny,”said Melrose, “I certainly remember clearly the Villa San Michele-the magnificent vaulted ceilings, the faded frescoes on the walls of the lobby, the subdued service in the dining room and that knock-out view of Florence from the balcony. But I don’t seem to recall the flageolet.”
“Trust Melrose,” said Agatha, “to sap all of the sentiment from any experience.” She went back to prodding a flower of broccoli around her plate.
“Not any experience, Agatha. Not the Masaccio experience, certainly. It had got to where I felt I knew him. Right, Marshall? You, me and Masaccio: We three, we happy three, we band of brothers.”
Thoughtfully, Diane exhaled a plume of smoke. “That has a familiar ring. And I agree with Melrose.” Having not been on the trip, Diane could take any side she wanted. “You know, some writer said Florence was absolutely overflowing. It was Henry… Henry… Oh, you know that writer who was so enamored of Italy.”
“Henry James?” said Vivian.
“That’s the one, yes.” Diane exhaled another artistic-looking stream of smoke. “You know, Superintendent, you’d enjoy Florence. They’ve all sorts of crime, I mean interesting crimes, society murders, that sort of thing. Who was that count? The Conti di Rabilant, I think, was murdered there. And you’d look marvelous in the uniform of the carabinieri. Quite smart.” Diane smiled at him in her sultry way. “What are you working on at the moment?”
“A shooting.”
Diane was interested. “Tell us about it, this shooting. We might be able to help; we might come up with one or two good ideas. Why you’ve seen-” Diane spread her black velvet-garbed arm “-how we are!”
“Indeed he has,” said Melrose.
Trueblood made a sound between a hiccup and a laugh. “Dream on, Diane.”
“But you never know how the details will strike someone unfamiliar with a case. Don’t you agree, Superintendent? Looking at something too long makes it all so familiar you can think it’s always been that way.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Trueblood.
“I thought it rather well put,” said Jury. “Only, look, it’s Christmas. Can’t we take a holiday from crime?”
Ruthven and his young helper had cleared away the dinner plates, and Ruthven reappeared with the Christmas pudding, which he placed before Melrose. “Shall I do it, sir?”
“No. This is the most fun I have all year. Give me the lighter.”
Ruthven handed over the sort of lighter one uses for cigars. The butler then wrapped a napkin around a bottle of Champagne and circled the table, pouring.
Melrose flicked the lighter and held it to the base of the pudding. Flames shot up amidst murmurs of pleasure. Everyone clapped. Melrose stood up and waited for Ruthven to fill the glasses, then he raised his. “A toast! To ‘we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’ ” He looked around the table. “And sisters.”
As everyone touched glasses, Diane said, “There it is again. I know I’ve heard that somewhere.”
“King Henry the Fourth,” said Melrose.
“Of course. The one who beheaded all of those wives.”
“Whoever,” said Melrose.
In dreams that night, Melrose found himself in the Brancacci Chapel watching the progress of several painters, one of whom was Trueblood. Only here, Melrose didn’t seem to know him any better than the others. He had been watching an infernally long time-days, weeks, months? How was he to know? He was starving hungry. Looking around he saw that each worker had a lunch box, but he had nothing. Seeing one of the lunch boxes lying open and also seeing it contained an apple, he took it and started munching while one of the painters up there delicately lined Eve’s face.
“Come on, come on!” Melrose yelled to him. “I’ve booked a table at the Villa San Michele, remember?”
Lithely, the youngest of the painters jumped down from the scaffolding and did a double somersault.
“Show-off,” said Melrose.
The show-off plucked the rest of the apple from Melrose’s hand and took a bite. “Nice dish o’ flageolet and I’m a happy man,” said Masaccio.
Fifty
They must be really angry.
Gemma had raised her hand to knock on the door of Keeper’s Cottage when she heard their raised voices and this made her drop her hand and take a step back. She had come to deliver a message from Mrs. MacLeish about Christmas dinner. But their voices made her back away.
It was Kitty Riordin and Maisie arguing. She could make out a few words: earring. The fight had to do with an earring. Gemma wondered if Kitty had discovered the gold one was missing. Did she think Maisie had taken it?
The voices were furious, frightening. Gemma gripped Richard as if she were afraid too much anger might knock him out of her hands. He was wearing the new clothes that Ambrose had given him for Christmas. The outfit was black: black jacket, trousers and a sweater. The suit was so soft, she liked to rub Richard on her cheek to feel it. “Black is cool,” Ambrose had said in his note. Gemma marveled at all of this. Richard looked wonderful in his new clothes. He looked smart and dangerous, virtues he had always had, but hidden under the old long dress.
Earring? No, that wasn’t it. It had something to do with an errand. Gemma thought she made out, “You’ve got to do this errand.”
The window was open just a little. The old mullioned panes prevented her seeing people clearly in there; they showed only as forms, wavering, distended, as if she were seeing them at the bottom of a pool.
The arguing stopped, suddenly. Silence. The door flew open before Gemma could get away. “Gemma! What are you doing here? How long have you been there?”
Gemma’s throat felt thick with sounds she couldn’t say. Maisie Tynedale turned and called to Kitty Riordin to come.
When she saw Gemma on the doorsill, Kitty sucked in her breath and asked the question again: “How long have you been there?”
Gemma swallowed and shook her head. Her feet seemed stuck. Then she managed to lift one but before she could move, Maisie Tynedale gripped her arm and pulled her into the cottage. Then she slammed the door shut.
Kitty was in her bathrobe and her hair was down from its smooth coiled bun. She looked much older with no makeup on. She was probably a hundred.
“Gemma,” she said, “come on in, dear.”
Fear sluiced through Gemma’s body as she clutched Richard closer. It was the “dear” that did it. Kitty never called her anything like that. She made a dash for the door, but Maisie was right there, her fingers like pincers on Gemma’s arm.
“For heaven’s sake, child, I thought you’d like some cocoa,” Kitty said. “Come back to the kitchen; I have it heating.”
Gemma’s eyes were riveted on her. Kitty Riordin, for all that Gemma avoided her, had never seemed so dangerous as right now, when she was trying to appear to be nice.
The kitchen was ordinary-cooker, fridge, a table against the biscuit-colored wall with three straight chairs, a clock on the wall decorated with a red rooster. The rooster was the only color there was.
Gemma unzipped her down coat and put Richard inside in case someone decided to grab at him. She zipped it up again.
They had sat her down on one of the hard chairs, and now Kitty placed a mug of cocoa in front of her, telling her it would warm her up. There were two other mugs sitting on the counter but she didn’t fill those. Instead, she watched to see that Gemma drank hers. Maisie had gone into the front room and come back with a bottle of whiskey, which she had poured into a couple of small glasses.
She thought about what a strange Christmas this was. How it lacked the usual excitement and suspense (though that had certainly changed in the last half hour!). She had not felt it to be Christmas Eve until she had wandered out after her evening meal and found-to her mystification and surprise-a package lying on her seat in the beech tree. It was wrapped with silver paper and white ribbon, and the note said, “Merry Christmas, Richard.” This had simply floored her: that someone would buy Richard a present! It had turned out to be Richard’s new black clothes. It was from Ambrose.
Earlier, Benny and Sparky had come with their Christmas presents for her. Sparky carried a bouquet of bluebells in his teeth which he set down at her feet and sneezed and stepped back, waiting for congratulations. Gemma thanked him and gave him the bone she had got for him. Her present for Benny (which she had wrapped with a lot of paper to disguise its book shape) was the David Copperfield Miss Penforwarden had told her Benny was always reading. She had asked Miss Penforwarden had she any ideas for a present, and this was it.
Benny had asked her not to open his present until Christmas morning and made her promise. She opened it, of course, the minute he was gone. It had made her jump with joy: a bottle of Bluebell perfume from Penhaligon’s. She straight away uncapped it and dabbed some on.
This had all gone on, this soft afternoon and evening, in a sort of dream.
Now, she supposed, here was the nightmare to finish things off. She felt herself slipping away as if she were turning liquid. The last thing her ears could pick out from their talking was something about “bread and water.” So she guessed she was going to prison and slept.
Bread and water. They were the first things she saw when she woke. Her head ached and she felt like going back to sleep, but she didn’t. Immediately, she felt her jacket to see if Richard was there and he was. She unzipped her coat and took him out.
With the bread and water there was also a wedge of cheese, all sitting atop a small counter on which there were plates, a couple of pans and a microwave oven. The room was cramped and shadowy, no light except for a wall sconce above one of the two narrow beds. It was small, but still it was rather nice. Cozy and warm. Above the beds were little windows; beside this one was a table with a drawer she yanked out. It was full of junk, but also rolls of coins and keys. She wondered what the keys were to.
To see out of the window, she would have to stand on the bed. Just as she did so, there came a frightening roar and then the room rocked and she was knocked back down. The contents of the drawer fell out, the coins rolling away under the bed. When things quieted down and straightened out, she got up on the bed again and looked out of the window.
“Richard! This is a boat! We’re on a boat on the river!”
Fifty-one
Sparky could always find his way to and back even in dead dark, but there was plenty of light along this bank and across on the other bank thousands of bulbs of light. Massive black heaps-lighted too-spanned the two sides of the river and seemed to have no purpose other than for cars to flow over and back, and, of course, to give shelter to the boy and his friends. This was the most important function of the nearest black heap.
Sometimes Sparky looked up at the people he passed, who walked like robots, staring straight ahead, listening only to what was in their heads and their ears. He wanted to shout! Down look down, look down, come down and get your noses to the ground and Sniff! There’s a whole sniffing life down here you’re passing up. The closest anyone came, and those were few, was reaching down to pet him, but they never stopped long.
Sniffing along the narrow concrete walk, he would spend hours nosing through trash and rags. He was only glad he no longer had to look through this stuff for food. It had been bad when he was little until the boy had found him and fed him and gone on feeding him. Yes, he loved the boy as much as a good sniff around a place.
He could stay up all hours, travel around, sleep all day if he wanted (well, except, of course, for deliveries). And he’d been given a name-Barky? Sparky? Perky?-it made no difference. The name was for the boy’s sake. Bernie? Benny? Bunny? Well.
Sparky was patrolling the bank all along the river and through the confluence of narrow dark streets which had once held nothing but warehouses, but were now where people lived and fancy cars sizzled through the rain.
Here was a bundle of rags. The smells shocked his senses so much that he came near to retreating even before the voice shouted “Piss off, ya fuckin’ mutt!”
Sparky trotted on, feeling stupid, as it wasn’t the first time this had happened, and by now he should have learned when a bundle of rags wasn’t a bundle of rags. The man was looking for something to throw when Sparky ran. He should be more careful about these wretches. Once, as he was sniffing one over, the wretch grabbed him, tossed a rope over his neck and took him up to the Strand for the day’s begging. It always helped to have a dog with you, Sparky knew that. He also knew he could get away. These people couldn’t keep their minds on things. When two pound coins were dropped in his old hat, the wretch got so excited and eager to pocket the coins that he let go of the rope and Sparky took off at a gallop, tore from the Strand to the Embankment and in a hop-skip-jump was back with the boy. The boy was overjoyed to see him. Poor Barney (Bernie?) was clearly worried to death, and Sparky wished he could convey to him how spectacular his talent for homing was, how infallible his nose. At times he thought he should have been a wine taster instead of a delivery dog. Or a florist, like the ones in the place of blue flowers.
There have been stories, he recalled, about the incredible homing feats of dogs like himself, such as the one who’d traveled all the way from Bognor Regis to Bath, searching for his owner who’d moved. Oh, sure, thought Sparky, don’t we wish?
Now, where was he? Stink Street. He called it that for it was home to more smells than any other single place he knew, except for marketplaces. Stink Street came close to knocking him out; it was in amongst all these old warehouses that were home to a lot of youngish snobs with good jobs and money. What he smelled was the rich odor of furs; the scent of the animals they had been ripped from still clung. New tires, cars, leather, sweetish smell of weed. Perfume. The mingling of perfumed scents strong enough to lift you off your legs.
Stink Street was a heady experience. He had to be careful of places like that; they could come to be necessary; they would not let you go. Sparky moved on out toward the river.
The door at the top of the ladderlike steps, which reminded her of an attic door, was not locked and this surprised her. Gemma pushed up one side and suddenly saw the night sky of stars and the white moon riding behind a gauzy cloud. With Richard again tucked inside her coat, she climbed out on the deck of the boat and looked around. She unzipped her coat and took Richard out so that he could see, too. The boat was fairly big; she’d never seen it before and could not imagine why she’d been put here.
“So you couldn’t get away,” she heard Richard say.
“Well, what am I supposed to do, then?”
“Get away, of course.”
There were times he just irritated her to death with his solutions to her problems. Ever since he’d got his new black clothes, he was impossibly bossy.
“It’s not impos-”
Gemma shoved him back inside her coat to shut him up. Then she got her bearings: the boat was closer to the one bank than the other. It was much closer to the Big Ben side than it was to the Southwark Cathedral side. There was one bridge fairly close; she did not know its name. Benny had shown her pictures of the next one down, and she knew it was Waterloo Bridge. Around the curve
of the river was Big Ben. So she knew where she was, pretty much.
Glad the boat was still, or the river was, she walked all around the deck, which didn’t take long. There were benches with plastic cushions built in on both sides; the place where you drove the boat was toward the front. That’s where the wheel was, with glass all around like a windshield that the captain could look through to see where he was going. She would never be able to figure out how to drive it. Anyway, the boat was anchored. Over there she saw what looked like a dock. And beyond the dock, a big squarish house. So the boat probably belonged to that house and the dock was for the boat. Maybe it was too big to pull up there, so it anchored here.
Richard was getting ready to tell her to swim for it, she bet, so before he could, she said, “I can’t swim!”
“Don’t mope or you’ll never-” came the muffled words from inside.
“I don’t mope!” Gemma closed her eyes, hoping if she didn’t give her mind any new sights to see it would be better able to concentrate on her problem. Wait a minute! Her eyes snapped open. There had to be a way to get from the bank-the dock-to the boat. It was somebody’s boat and if that person could get to it, then there had to be a way.
“Good good good good!” Richard cried.
But if that was the only boat…? Gemma walked around the deck again slowly, peering over the side. A smaller boat, a rowboat it looked like, was tied to the side of the big boat. She wondered if it was okay, if it had any leaks in it, but if it had, it would already have sunk, wouldn’t it?
She shrank back. But I can’t get down there-
“You can too; it’s hardly any distance at all. Find a rope; there are always ropes on boats. Don’t just stand there.”
“I’m only nine. How can I-?”
“Oh, for God’s sake! Get me out of here and I’ll find a rope!” Gemma took Richard out from under her coat and held him in front of her. While she walked, she turned him different ways so that he could inspect the deck. Slowly around the deck they walked.