Operation Nassau by Dorothy Dunnett Page B

requires, I have always known, a very special kind of bank balance. The kind that comes with deceased Indian princes, for example. The Begum, I had heard, had spent her brief married life in North India, far from the fields of her native Huntingdonshire, and on her husband’s death had not remarried, but had amused herself acquiring houses in different parts of the globe, and surrounding herself with neurotic idiopaths like my father, whose excesses appeared to amuse her.
    I had kept well out of her way. I thought of the files on James Ulric’s desk and positioned myself to follow in Mr Timpson’s closing wake. ‘How nice to meet you,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I must rush. Mr Johnson is expecting us.’
    ‘I know. He told me,’ said the Begum. She smiled at Lady Edgecombe. She had small, irregular teeth and a firm chin, which gave her smile a strong element of attraction. Lady Edgecombe’s trim eyebrows lifted and she smiled back. The Begum said, ‘I’m hoping you’ll both come and look at my portrait. I’m the Begum Akbar, known as Thelma usually.’
    ‘I know. I’m Denise Edgecombe. I live on Great Harbour Cay. May I say,’ said Bart Edgecombe’s wife, ‘how perfectly lovely your sari is.’
    I didn’t say anything at all. I was brooding over the dishonesty of Johnson Johnson. He had said nothing to me about the Begum being here. Or of having painted the Begum for that matter. I began to wonder what else he had neglected to tell me.
    ‘Come,’ said the Begum. ‘It is the third portrait on the left, between the Duchess and the Governor. The Press came a short while ago to photograph us all standing beside our commissions. It’s a kind of club, isn’t it; the sitters of Johnson?’
    I was silent, and so was Lady Edgecombe beside me. I don’t suppose either of us had realized what a big name he was. Presumably all the paintings here had been lent back for the exhibition, and the subjects had come too, to drink champagne and be photographed and meet Johnson again. He had disappeared again in a welter of spectacle frames: Timpson equally had vanished. The Begum, exchanging smiles and waves and snatches of conversation as she swayed through the crowd, arrived with a certain iron persistence before her own portrait and tapped the silk shoulder of a long-haired young man standing before it. ‘Krishtof, I won’t have you study it. It gives too much away,’ said the Begum. ‘You have met Beltanno and Lady Edgecombe, have you not? Dear Krishtof is coming to stay as my house-guest.’
    The Turkish dancer. So that was why he had flown to Nassau. He was on his way to stay with the Begum. ‘I have not only met Lady Edgecombe: I have danced with her,’ said Krishtof Bey cheerfully. The mongoloid face gave as little away as his hostess’s: the slanting eyes smiled in a manner one could describe without whimsy as evil. His hand, when he gave it to me, was long and thin and stringy with muscle. He wore a cinnamon tunic and trousers with gold Turkish slippers and the discreet bodyguard of his friends, I noticed, was between him and the crowd. I said. ‘Has Johnson painted you as well, Mr Krishtof?’
    ‘This he is going to do,’ said the dancer. ‘In the nude, do you think, Dr MacRannoch? Or with one small flower? The après-midi d’un faune?’
    ‘The Miracle in the Gorbals?’ I suggested.
    He was not abashed. ‘But nothing is outwith a doctor’s experience! The naked man you have seen in his thousands.’
    ‘True.’ I agreed. ‘Mainly cadavers.’
    ‘And that is how you think of us?’ He came very close, with his almond eyes trying to mesmerize mine. ‘Cold? Unresponsive? Repellent?’
    The Begum chuckled. Lady Edgecombe, beside me, was visibly out of patience. ‘On the contrary,’ I said shortly. ‘There are few things more beautiful than the blood vascular system of the grown human body. Until you have dissected two cutaneous arteriovenous anastomoses, you have no idea what elegance