Free Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 by Unknown Page B

Your man sends his regards and says the dynamo’s fixed and she’s ready.”
    He didn’t need to prove that he’d gone where he said he had. I didn’t mind whether he had been to Naples or a European Grand Masters’ Tournament with Omar Sharif, so long as he had decided, of his own accord, to come back. I said to Johnson, “I’m sorry. You’ve been so kind. You wouldn’t like two tickets for
II Barone Rampante
?”
    Charles was already standing at the door of the Maserati. Johnson smiled and shook his head and drove off in a roar of high octane fuel while Charles got hold of me in full view of the clientele of the Rampant Baron and kissed me.
    I relieved Jacko at midnight, which may or may not surprise you. Charles refused to come to the Dome on the grounds that he would only distract me, which was certainly true. I left him in bed, received on my way out the felicitations of our landlady and had to hammer on the door of the Dome when I got there, because the locksmiths had replaced the burst lock and Jacko had forgotten to hand out the new keys. All Jacko carries in his head are thousands of coordinates and the correct meter readings for three-dimensional natural objects, preferably moving.
    He is, however, a hard-working and reliable duty man. He had been observing since seven o’clock although the weather impinged on the hazy. A cloudy sky up till midnight means, in our own code, that you can turn it in after that if you want to. I wished that night that he hadn’t been so hard-working.
    He had made me coffee, and we had it in the Dome while I checked over what he had finished. I would develop his plates with mine in the morning, and by the end of the week we could pack them up and send them on to the Trust. It was the last pack we should send there this season. The week of the full moon started on Saturday, and that meant no photography. And by the end of the next week we’d have reached the end of our contract. I began to hum under my breath as I perched myself up on the ladder and Jacko, about to open the door to the stairs, said, “Don’t tell me. I’m clairvoyant. Charles is back?”
    I said, stricken, “Oh Christ. Jacko, I’m terribly sorry. We’ve got the bed again. I meant to put it back in your room as I left.”
    “The way I feel,” said Jacko, “it doesn’t matter. Timothy tells me you all had a gas at the Barberini. He dropped Innes off at his digs, loaded up to the eyeballs with aftershave.”
    I revised my opinion of Timothy’s kindheartedness and tried to think of a way of not telling Jacko what he was asking. The trouble with Jacko is that he really does go for Di. I said, “You’ll never guess who we saw in the Barberini. The man who sold Charles and me the balloon outside the zoo. We ran after him and lost him somewhere in the Corso.”
    “At the Fall Fair?” said Jacko, arrested. “You’re dreaming. The Yanks wouldn’t let a street trader in — not if he went through a car wash and wax spray with Dettol. Ruth, precious, you’ve seen too many teleromanzos on the goggle box.”
    I said, “He was specially scoured for the occasion. Johnson’s got a photograph. I couldn’t stop him. There is shortly going to be a sonic boom at the Trust which could be felt in three continents, and I only hope I’m not there to hear it. In the meantime, that unfortunate star is going to set in forty minutes.”
    “I’m off,” Jacko said. The cool air flowed in from the cupola. Warm from bed, I felt it on my face, but not at all through my thick jersey and anorak. In the dim light Jacko’s face looked like a clown’s, with the sad eyes and tangled hair and Zapata mustache. I said, “I’m going back after five to have breakfast. You can bunk downstairs here, if you want to.”
    “Thanks,” said Jacko morosely.
    “Without service and back-up facilities,” I called after him, and heard him make a rude noise as I shut the door and swung up the bench and prepared the filter and plate