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

doorway. “One, the couture people won’t want the publicity. And two, the police will link you with the recent nasty occurrence by the condor house. Two cameras mysteriously wrecked in one evening is too much of a coincidence.”
    “We met him in the grounds,” said Charles very sweetly, answering my unspoken question. “He went back for some small reinforcements.”
    “I brought them too,” said Johnson and, opening a duffel bag, displayed three bottles of champagne and three others of vodka. “With Maurice’s compliments. He was sorry to hear that poor Jacko had tripped down the stair shaft. Shall we adjourn, would you say, to the kitchen?”
    We started with the champagne and then we finished the three bottles of vodka, a passable feat for five people, and blew the fuse of the stove while boiling up coffee. In between, we swapped obituary notices proper to what had been a stirring evening:
    We could not say our last farewell
    Nor even say goodbye
    For you were gone before we knew
    And only God knows why.

----
Chapter 3
    « ^ »
    The next day, Sunday, we all spent nursing our hangovers in bed and searching the papers for Gothic accounts of the headless form found in the zoo park toletta. We didn’t have far to look. Even the llama got into the picture, although there were no sensitive camera studies of Lo Rapaci. The police were treating it, they said, as obvious murder. Charles and I got up for lunch, and then went back to bed again.
    At four o’clock, the iron shutters went up like gunfire, and the village prepared for its promenade. At four-thirty, with a bang louder than gunfire, Charles slammed the door of our joint digs and left me.
    By then it was no news to the village. Charles and I are normally rather muted performers, but whereas I quarrel also in very low gear, Charles’s voice rises in anger; and he had been very angry indeed. In retrospect, I put it all down to its being Sunday.
    Although all the museums are free, not even Innes goes into Rome on a Sunday. Every ruin is packed like a biscuit box. And between eleven and twelve, fresh out from late Mass and present unto the third and fourth generation, the whole of Rome packs itself into its Fiat 500’s and sets off, driving slowly, for Parassio.
    Or Neni, or whatever. After lunch, it returns, driving even more slowly and not all that straight, for reasons not at all to do with the health of great-aunt and the bambini.
    To visit Rome on a Sunday is suicide. Particularly if you are Charles in a rage. More particularly if you are Charles in a rage and your Alfa Romeo is still having its brakes fixed. There are nine motor repair shops in Parassio, and I could only hope that he’d forgotten which one he’d left it at.
    He didn’t come back that night, and I was at work all day on the Monday, with a wrecked stove and a temper. Jacko and I have an arrangement, because the Rome shops shut that day. I work, and he goes to the Spanish Steps and picks up new subjects for his photography. By November, the German blondes and sultry Philadelphians have disappeared, but the Rampa and every other staircase in Rome is thick with homesick students reading their letters. Jacko merely looks at the postmarks and addresses them in the language of origin. One day, someone will smash Jacko’s camera. One day, someone will smash Jacko if he is not very, very careful.
    I was packing the plates when Maurice came to pay one of his state visits to his seigneurial property. In the weeks since he brought us to Italy, Maurice had become quite knowledgeable about the observatory. He sat and talked while I went on boxing them, each plate in its transparent envelope with a card giving the date and exposure and atmospheric conditions obtaining. There were plates for every day: the Zodiac Trust would expect a full record to process. I even included the plates we had spoiled. There would be a few from Saturday night, for example, to explain away.
    There was nearly another that