Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 Read Online Free Page B

had,” said Johnson mildly.
    “I mean…” said Charles.
    “What am I doing here? Oh,” said Johnson. “I’m painting the Pope. I shan’t blackmail you if you won’t blackmail me. Now then. The Maurice Frazer Observatory. Do help yourself to a tissue,” he added, “if you want to wipe the blood off that camera.” And he put the Fiat into gear and tooled off.
    We got to the Dome in forty minutes, having done the Piazza Galeno in one dizzy circuit and roared past all the tarts on the motorway, doing roughly a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Whatever was under the bonnet of that Fiat wasn’t cinquecenti, and Charles and I by tacit consent gave Johnson Johnson the address of the Dome and not the address of the humble lodgings we both shared with Jacko. We had not only been picked up by a nut: we had been picked up by a well-off and dangerous nut and were likely to be exposed either in print or in prison, whatever we did about it.
    At the Dome we asked him in for a coffee, which unfortunately he accepted, and I went ahead and yelled up to Jacko, who was fixing his plateholder on the swing-up shelf which bars the other side of the cupola door and makes sure that idiots don’t march into the dome with their torches on.
    He came down a few minutes later to make sure we had all the blinds closed but actually to see what Charles had in his hip flask. Astronomers are not allowed to drink before they go on duty: you can get enough straight hallucinations just looking for eight hours through a telescope without resorting to alcohol. Charles, an intuitive man, poured him a noggin for afters into a yellow Melamine cup and related the event of the evening in four succinct sentences while liberally lacing our coffee. Jacko went becomingly white and said, “Christ. The Zodiac Trust’ll have kittens.”
    The top brass of the Trust, in the person of one Professor Hathaway, does not expect its projects to get mixed up in murders or suicides. “It won’t,” I said. “It’ll have baby lawyers with letters of dismissal all ready for signing by Mr. Frazer.” I stared at Jacko with what I hoped was a message of despair in my eyes. “Maybe,” I added, “since Mr. Johnson got us away, the police will never get to hear how it happened. Mr. Johnson,” I added with emphasis, “is here to paint the Pope.”
    “I know,” said Jacko. His color was coming back. He twisted the nearest messianic lock of his hair. “Would the Pope help?”
    I sometimes think the only reason Di goes to bed with Jacko is that he asks such damned silly questions. I was about to answer this one when Charles, heretofore much subdued, said suddenly, “How do you know?”
    “We met last week at Castel Gandolfo,” said Jacko. “My God, where did you get that damned cup from?”
    Castel Gandolfo is the Pope’s Summer Palace. It also houses the Vatican Observatory in an elegant house by the lakeside. If Johnson was there, at the very least it was with the Pontiff’s permission. I said to Johnson Johnson, “I beg your pardon.”
    “Granted,” he said.
    “Where the hell did that come from!” said Jacko. He was talking about Charles’s cup. Charles pointed to a cupboard and Jacko ran and fell on his knees in front of it. Then he put both hands around the handle like oven mitts and opened the cupboard a fraction. A white mouse with red eyes sneaked out of it and ran under the stove.
    “Poppy!” I said accusingly.
    “I was going to put her back,” said Jacko hurriedly. “That bastard Innes tore up all my pictures.”
    “I’d have torn them up too if I’d thought of it,” I said with exasperation. Open war between Jacko and Innes was all that I needed. “Now you’ll have to take them all over again. Think of that.”
    He didn’t hear me because he was lying full length under the stove with a broom. Charles had found some All-Bran and was emptying it on the tiled floor while Johnson Johnson, with great presence of mind, had shut the door and