Moroccan Traffic by Dorothy Dunnett

Author:Dorothy Dunnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Moroccan Traffic
ISBN: 9780755131556
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Let the men take the strain, the Geddes woman had said. Advice that would bring out the street militants on any professional business course I’d ever taken, or listened to. I thought of my mother’s cassettes piled up back at the hotel. How to use the Triple-Tick System for Making Problem Free Travel Arrangements. How to Avoid the One Secretarial Mistake That Could Destroy Your Career. I sat in the yellow taxi taking Johnson and Morgan and me to the Oppenheim party, and I let them take the strain.

I thought they might be good at it. Dressing, I had already listened to Johnson delivering a lecture to Morgan as he changed in the next room. There was no doubt which was which. Johnson and Sir Robert might have been to the same school. Johnson said, ‘May I bore you with a circumstance you will have thought of already? An Oppenheim-aided buyout of you and your microchips would hit Sir Bobs and help, I have to say, to keep Rita out of his clutches. At this moment, you may like the idea as much as I do, but there are several possible glitches. One, Oppenheim might be fronting for a crook with BO. Two, King Cong won’t unbundle you lightly, and he’s got Muriel’s picture.’

‘And yours,’ Morgan said. ‘And Wendy’s.’

‘I don’t mind if Wendy doesn’t,’ Johnson said. ‘And lastly, there’s a strong possibility, I should say, that someone will come and sing you a sweet song to the effect that, if only you agree to stay on at Kingsley’s—’

‘I’ll be buried a K,’ Morgan said.

There was a pause. Then Johnson’s voice, wholly fascinated, said, ‘Did someone say that?’

‘Sir Robert,’ Morgan said. He began laughing at the same moment as Johnson. When I met them outside, he was looking cheered-up and almost respectable in a check shirt outside a pair of fresh pants and a pair of Mafia dark glasses. He said, ‘Wendy. My God, how did you ever give birth to your mother? Turn round.’ And as I did so he added, ‘Just had my first naval briefing. Always look at the print under the small print. That’s really pretty fetching.’

‘I’m fetched,’ said Johnson surveying me. He put a calm, steering hand on my back. ‘Come on. Into the circus.’ And they kept up the joshing, in between talking football, all the way to the Oppenheims’.

Thirty years before, when African Cup games began, Jimmy Auld had been flown out to coach in Morocco: a married man with a toddler. He was a widower now, and the same toddler was thirty-five, and married to Daniel Oppenheim the investment adviser, and had been photographed semi-nude in several postures on Johnson’s yacht Dolly.

None of us could have avoided that thought, driving into the sweeping courtyard before the Oppenheims’ rented pad in the French quarter. Even Johnson broke off as we crawled through the crowds in the driveway. The mansion was large, and the ground full of flowering bushes and people and palm trees.

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