Operation Nassau

by Dorothy Dunnett

  I said. ‘I did take tests, that’s true. Sir Bartholomew was given a dose of arsenic both times, by whom I don’t know. I need hardly say’ - I looked at Johnson - ‘if the police get to hear that I’ve concealed the fact, it’ll be the end of my career.’

  ‘We won’t tell them,’ said Johnson soothingly. ‘Thelma, you can vouch for everyone here? We don’t want Beltanno in trouble.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said James Ulric suddenly. My dear, doting old father. ‘But didn’t Edgecombe want the police told? And why did Florence Nightingale here agree not to tell them?’

  ‘Tell them,’ said Johnson through the haze of his pipe. ‘You won’t believe this, Thelma, and I’ll thank you to remember it the next time you accuse me of boring you, although I must remember in future not to raise these matters before meals. Beltanno, tell them what Bart said that his job was.’

  It was like double-talk in the operating theatre when the patient is only partly anaesthetized. I kicked the Spoonmakers’ Union mentally in the teeth and gave my answer, right or wrong, but bang on the cue. ‘He said he was a member of the British intelligence service,’ I said. ‘He persuaded me, too.’

  Like a handsome doll in her robes, the Begum was staring at me. ‘You’re making it all up. Johnson, what are you teaching this girl?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Johnson. ‘No one has anything to teach Dr B. Douglas MacRannoch. She believed Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe, and I believe her. And what’s more, I’m keeping my mouth shut about it. If the espionage network is gunning for Bart, then the counter-espionage network can get on with gunning right back without help from us.’

  Four people said ‘But—’ and I swear you could hear their ectopic cardiac beats chiming like clocks. My father said, ‘In that case he’s not coming here. Thelma, I forbid you to invite Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe here. Johnson here was once nearly killed in mistake for that man, and his wife has been killed. Which of us might be next?’

  ‘Really, James,’ said the Begum with interest. ‘You mean you think the killer is here?’

  My father is not one to boggle. ‘If he isn’t here, he could get here without blowing his mind. How many people are coming from Nassau for this beach barbecue next week?’

  ‘Seventy-five,’ the Begum said serenely. ‘Most of them MacRannochs, darling.’

  Krishtof Bey, his face solemn, shook his head slowly. ‘This is bad. Even registered breeds have their deviants.’

  I despised them all, and especially Johnson’. I said icily, ‘I cannot imagine that Sir Bartholomew returning from his wife’s funeral will wish to attend a beach barbecue. May I invite Mr Tiko?’

  My father shouting, ‘No!’ clashed with the Begum answering, ‘Yes.’ She went on firmly, ‘Of course Sir Bartholomew need not come to the barbecue unless he wishes. But I will not throw this poor man to his attackers. He will stay safely here on my island as long as he wishes. And so far as the Asiatic 46th Chief of the MacRannochs is concerned, the answer is equally simple. Beltanno will tell you. The quickest way to make anyone immunologically competent is to expose them freely to the disease.’

  It was a layman’s imprecise grasp of a precise physical law but I overlooked it. If I was an emotional midget, the fault was my father’s. tramping through all my nascent relationships to visit his traplines. This time I was setting my own gin with the Begum’s assistance, and James Ulric wasn’t going to keep Mr Tiko away. I wanted to see Mr Tiko’s face when he found out I was The MacRannoch’s sole daughter. If I lived long enough. that is to say.

  The lunch gong sounded as the Begum’s butler was handing round drinks and everyone was in the midst of exclaiming and speculating about Edgecombe’s precise function in the unbelievable and slightly ridiculous world of espionage. During all the boring repetition of events at the airport, at the club and elsewhere it was remarkable how earnest was the conversation and thoughtful were the theories of the three men most closely implicated: Brady, Trotter and the dancer.

  Since the Begum’s fantasy had turned into cold fact, no one had had the bad taste to refer to the favoured position of these three in the list of suspects. No one either appeared to notice that Johnson had done the very thing he had warned me against in Nassau. He had warned the murderer, if the murderer were one of these three, that I alone had the physical proof that Bart Edgecombe had been poisoned.

  My irritation with James Ulric evaporated. Even my plans for Mr Tiko began to appear somewhat flat. If anyone in this house was laying traps, it was Johnson Johnson. And the lure, 126 lb deadweight, was me.

  ELEVEN

  I remember very little of that lunch, except that during it, I decided to apply for a Heinz Fellowship in Zambia. After coffee, the Begum announced that the immediate hours of heat were to be spent, by order, in siesta, and that we should forgather later by the swimming-pool. Having tried to catch Johnson’s eye yet again, and been repulsed by those despicable bifocals, I walked upstairs to my room and locked myself in.

  I took off my dress and lay on the bed. Without petticoat and girdle, I had to admit, my pores functioned more freely. There was a pink patch, from the second rib down to the navel, where Paul’s oiling yesterday had ameliorated the effect of the sun. Above my head a fan moved like an aircraft propeller, stirring my wig and rustling the long blossoming stems in a Chinese vase in the corner, across an unthinkable expanse of white fitted bearskin. The air- conditioner hummed.

  It was peaceful, as under a hair-dryer. In cedarwood fitted cupboards, my new clothes hung out of sight. Beside me on a low table were a Chinese lamp, some new books in glossy dust-jackets, cigarettes, a lighter and ash tray and a vacuum flask of iced water. No telephone. No telephones on the out-islands of the Bahamas. No telephones or radio transmitters on Crab.

  The branches stirred, pale pink against the taffeta of the drawn curtains. A frivolous dusk enfolded the room. It was the same shape as my room in Castle Rannoch, but my room at home had no fitted wardrobes and only one deep-set window, looking on to the sea. The cold sea and the rain. I closed my eyes.

  No fitted carpet either. My room in Castle Rannoch had a grey stone-flagged floor, with an old and valuable rug. One of the first tests of a candidate had been his response to that rug. The boy who had taken me home from the Oban Gathering had offered to get an uncle to mend it. Last seen of that boy.

  Last seen of any boy worth a damn.

  I opened my unwilling eyes. The curtain billowed. This room is just like my room in Castle Rannoch except that everything in it is in perfect condition, save for B. Douglas MacRannoch.

  Query: What did I have to drink at lunch?

  Answer: Tomato juice.

  Addendum: Krishtof Bey was at table beside me.

  My room at Castle Rannoch connects with a dressing-room at Castle Rannoch used as a bedroom by my succession of nurses. At Castle Rannoch, the doorway would be behind that pink curtain.

  The pink curtain billowed.

  Even when on automatic pilot my reactions, I am happy to say, are faster than most people’s. I snatched the gun from my pillow before the silk had dropped into place and fired, one, two, three times. Three neat holes appeared in the pink. The stacked branches of blossom dropped like corpses, rigid to one side of the vase. And the vase itself began moving slowly towards me.

  I raised the gun, and someone beside me plucked it neatly out of my hand.

  ‘Stop,’ said Krishtof Bey. ‘It is Tang, and the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would ill-wish your next elective abortion.’

  I sat there in my Marks and Sparks knickers and brassiere while the rest of him came out from under the bed. He had my gun in one hand, and a long lassoo haltering the Chinese vase in the other. He was still wearing the gold necklace and the pair of green cotton beach pants. His deltoids were candidly staggering. He said, ‘Dear Dr MacRannoch. My Imam says my fate is not to be shot. I thought you might have a gun.’

  I will not pretend to be calm. A mentally subnormal patient subject to hypomanic
attacks is good-humoured, requires little sleep and is always complaining of hunger. With my larded midriff maintained as upright as the bedding made possible, I said with gentle authority, ‘I never shoot a man who is sick, Krishtof Bey. I try to help him. Would you like a biscuit?’

  The Tartar face tilted and shook slowly in thought. ‘I hadn’t thought of it. Have you got a biscuit?’ he said.

  I smiled warmly. ‘In the pocket of my coat. Over there, you see, with my dresses.’

  The gun did not waver, but I had puzzled him. ‘Do you always carry biscuits about in your pockets?’ he said.

  Vodka, I thought. An alcoholic with an acute anxiety neurosis may break at any moment into psychotic episodes. ‘I get hungry,’ I said. ‘In the other pocket you’ll find a flask of Scotch whisky.’

  He lay on the bearskin regarding me, his elbow holding the pistol resting quietly on the edge of my bed, and the ends of his hair stirred on his shoulders as he shook his head yet again. A trace of anxiety appeared and vanished. He had, as they all do, a strong streak of cunning. His voice, even, had become soft and gentle. ‘Try to relax,’ he said. ‘Forget the gun. Just lie back, Dr MacRannoch. and I will bring to you the whisky flask and also the biscuits. Close your eyes.’

  It wasn’t quite what I meant, but it would do. My distress score rating, o for calm and 100 for panic, dropped to around 25 and oscillated at the ready. I closed my eyes and he got up from the bearskin and moved over to the sliding doors of the wardrobe.

  I made a single athletic bound for the door.

  Krishtof Bey made the kind of leap I am told Nijinsky performed as a large Hybrid Tea, and, hooking my ankle, brought me down on my brassiere thud on the white bearskin carpet. He then flipped me over and with three turns of his lassoo, bound my wrists together before me.

  I was not inactive. I have felled a full-scale chromosomal aberration before now; I have brought a six-foot Y Y syndrome to his knees. But never before had I fought a Turkish ballet dancer in full command of his unsuppressed senses. When I found myself at length, hands bound and flat on the carpet, I felt like a foam-plastic prototype in an ergonomics laboratory. Krishtof Bey, his respiration barely stirring his necklace, tossed the gun in the air, caught it, laid it on a table and said. ‘Were you hoping I was a nice, easy manic depressive? I’m not. I just wanted to ask you, Dr B. Douglas MacRannoch, about that arsenic poisoning.’ And he sat on my feet before I could kick him and added sweetly, ‘And I dare you to scream.’

  It wasn’t rate 100 yet; but it wasn’t too far away from the 90s, at that. The oblique, cynical eyes smiled down at me. All right. He didn’t have the gun. But with muscles like those, and speed like that.

  he could choke the life out of me long before any scream of mine could be heard beyond those thick walls. And I knew just how thick those walls were. I cleared my throat. I said. ‘Tell me how you did it.’

  I hadn’t expected him really to talk, and he didn’t. He smiled. ‘Tell me what happened to the results of those arsenic tests. Did you write them down?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. A sound idea had just occurred to me.

  ‘And where are they?’ said Krishtof Bey. His voice was over-friendly and feline, like a neurotic Abyssinian. I wished him blocked tear-ducts and ear mites.

  ‘Johnson Johnson has them,’ I said. ‘And if you kill me, he’ll hand them straight to the police.’

  ‘Exposing Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe as an agent?’ asked Krishtof Bey. Reclining picturesquely beside me, he was stroking the area of my lower diaphragm with a speculative finger, ‘Poor darling.’

  He was not referring to Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe. My skin twitched. I said, ‘Of course. Well, the murderer at least must already know he’s an agent.’

  ‘Suppressive therapy,’ said Krishtof Bey thoughtfully. ‘Against men. Did you take a course. Beltanno? What did they do, inject a nausea response to after-shave lotion?’ He picked up my tied wrists, damn him, and impudently felt my pulse. ‘Then why haven’t you or Johnson told the police already?’ he said.

  I quelled a strong impulse to tremble, and tried to concentrate my intellectual powers. If I didn’t watch it, I was going to blow Johnson’s precious cover, as the jargon regrettably went. I wasn’t at all sure whether I cared. I said, ‘Johnson didn’t want trouble. And it was just possible that this was a personal feud against Edgecombe. But if anything happens to me, even Johnson won’t hesitate. I promise you that.’

  He grinned. He was still holding my pulse. I said. ‘Why do you want to kill Edgecombe? Was Johnson right? Does he know something about you?’

  Krishtof Bey rose to his feet like a milk-pouring commercial run backwards, and struck the fifth position, brown arms outflung. He relaxed, and gazed down his torso at me. ‘Everyone knows about dancers,’ he said. ‘Am I not a magnificent animal?’

  ‘So are laboratory chimpanzees,’ I said. ‘And you should see their psychoses.’

  He bounced lightly and lay on the bed, looking at me. ‘In Izmir at this moment two secretaries are answering my love-mail. Letters from ballet-sick ladies all over the world, with their photographs, Beltanno. In Copenhagen, where I am dancing next month, they will put up the crash barriers and give me a police escort from the house of my host to the theatre. In my diary I have invitations from multi-millionaires, from film stars, from royalty. Today, in a hundred places in the world, someone is saying, “Where is Krishtof Bey? What is he doing? Will he come to my costume ball, will he agree to dance in our opera house; will he come and make love to me if I send him a diamond link-belt, or maybe a Cadillac . . .?’”

  His dangling arm drifted down to my thigh and I watched it, my calf-muscles bunched. He withdrew it snappishly. ‘Beltanno, will you relax?’

  ‘How can I?’ I spat back at him. ‘Until I find out whether you’re going to kill me or rape me?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. A charming smile spread over that conceited, deceitful, gorgeous Tartar face. Slow as a crêpe de Chine scarf he began to slide over the edge of the bed; paused, smiled, and landed with a thud on my struggling body.

  ‘Beltanno. darling, I’m not going to kill you,’ he murmured.

  In all my medical reading I have found no clinical description of the kiss which he then pressed upon me, or its effect on the psyche. The chemical responses to near-suffocation are well known, as are the standard reactions to shock: respiration 30 per minute, heart 120, blood pressure 80/50 mm Hg.

  One could not do test strips to isolate what I felt at that moment, or invoke the reactions of suckling mice. I stopped struggling.

  After four minutes the kiss moved down my neck and lingered here and there round my clavicles. My bronchial walls galloped, but I attempted no purposive movement. In fact I had closed my eyes when I became aware that Krishtof Bey had detached himself and was sitting back on his heels, viewing me thoughtfully. ‘Don’t let’s rush it.’ he said. ‘There’s no hurry.’

  There was something wrong with my attention span. After a long time I said, ‘Don’t rush what?’ I was still lying on the floor. It was very comfortable.

  Krishtof Bey rose to his feet, floated round to my bedside table and poured out two glasses of iced water. He put one on the bearskin beside me and untied my wrists. ‘To counteract the vodka,’ he said. ‘It is true: I could not believe it: you have never been kissed before? A nice woman doctor like you? Not even in medical school?’

  I was dissecting male Blumer’s shelves while the others were kissing in medical school. In my year there was one Sohrab, five Abduls and sixteen Mohammeds, but no Krishtof Bey. He brought across the white bath-robe which was all I had for a dressing-gown and I put it on and drank my iced water, sitting in a deep furry chair. I was still fairly comatose, although I wondered why he had stopped kissing me. I even wondered, I believe, if I had done something wrong.

  The word vodka was borne in by some kind of slow release capsule. I said vaguely accusing, ‘You did put the vodka into my tomato juice?’

  ‘Begum’s orde
rs,’ said the Magnificent Animal succinctly. He vanished for a moment behind the pink slubbed-silk curtain and reappeared with a tape-recorder slung from his fingers. It didn’t even occur to me to get up from my chair. I frowned.

  ‘Begum’s orders?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t ask me why.’ He was fiddling with the tape-recorder, which gave out a long passage of chirrups. Then he got what he wanted and looked up with that slow, cat-like smile. ‘You didn’t really think I was going to kill you?’

  ‘You tied my hands,’ I said. I drank some more iced water. I do not know what was the matter with me.

  ‘True. It is the first time I have had to immobilize a woman before I have kissed her,’ said Krishtof. ‘On the other hand, it is the first time also she has tried to shoot me.’ The tape-recorder, at full volume, had burst into a ninety-piece orchestral rendering of the Breadcrumb Fairy variation from the Sleeping Princess and he rose on the points of his slippers and did a few desultory steps while he was talking. It was very confusing.

  Despite it, however, I was coming to myself. I said, ‘Why did you hide in my room? You wanted to know what I had done with the arsenic tests. You didn’t want to kiss me. You wanted to find out how much I knew.’

  ‘I wanted to find out how much you knew about kissing,’ he said.

  He stopped and wreathed my face with his hand in the ballet symbol for affection, as explained in the Covent Garden programmes. I went there once as the guest of a performing ruptured appendix. He moved off, crossing his knees in an unlikely manner. ‘It was a joke, my dear Dr MacRannoch. So correct. So unapproachable. How to kiss you? It was easy. I make you drunk, and I make you frightened.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said.

  He turned and bourrée’d back over the bearskin, ending in a charming half-hitch. ‘You don’t believe me because you have no confidence in yourself,’ he said. ‘You are very kissable, Doctor. You have a body that might be a dancer’s, a little ruined by golf, but one could set that right. You have strength and precision . . Listen, does the music not move you?’