Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 by Unknown Page A

raging turmoil of the Mercado and up this long, narrow ramp to the portals, and the moment we crawled in under it we were in quiet and shadow. An old woman in black and two girls with long hair and brown boots flattened against the grey, peach-mortared stone of the buttresses, and then we were turning sharp right into a tall, shadowy room, half arcaded, and roofless to the blue sky, at the other end of which was the only exit: another arched portal giving onto the sunlit cobbled plaza of the old Moorish town of Ibiza, under the lee of the tall white houses lodged in a cliff of dazzling masonry on our left.
    I hardly had time to take it in: the round glassy cobbles, the kids playing, the pump, the washing hanging high in the sun; a grocer’s, a little, dark wine shop, a café with tables out in the sun; a lot of songbirds in cages. Then Janey swung left in a hairpin bend that rolled me onto her shoulder, and we were going up a perpendicular alley about six inches wide, with the wall of the roofless entry room on our left, and on our right, small shops—I caught a glimpse of antiques—broken by stretches of wall. Suddenly the passage widened, and the cobbles gave way to tarmac, and we were in a small square between more little antique shops and bars, with stepped lanes and paths leading up on the right, and a stony slope on the left which seemed to go up to the ramparts. From the square led a broad, garden-lined avenue, still rising steeply, labeled Avenida General Franco. Beyond the strip of park on our right, you could see a low-level dirt road, lined with crowded four-story houses and bars, with small, low, broken doors and children crying, and flights of steep steps overhung with low trees and bougainvillea and cacti. Strings for washing draped every wall, with plastic clothes-pegs in bunches, like lovebirds. The two roads joined with steps at another hairpin bend, and I lurched to the right as Janey fluted the Maserati’s horn and spun the wheel coolly, her dark glasses flashing. She had been here before. She had been to Austin Mandleberg’s gallery before, often, but hadn’t bothered to mention it until a minute ago.
    It wasn’t much further. The tarmac road went on, with a pavement, past a patch of garden and a green-shuttered church and up to a flat place facing some broad, grassy steps. There Janey changed gear and swung right. I had a glimpse behind us of a wide, modern square with a lot of trees and a long white building with arches, and even of a sudden flash of blue sea at the end; then the Maserati swung its back to the view and went on climbing, this time past beautiful two- and three-story houses linked together, painted brown or dazzling white. As the convertible crawled slowly onward, I looked from side to side at green double-leafed doors and wrought balconies, spilling over with red potted geraniums and creepers. Some of the windows had elaborate grilles: behind one, somewhere, someone was playing the piano. We passed, on our left, a flight of broad whitewalled steps, and then a long stretch of white wall over which the garden above spilled its treasures: cactus creepers, a trail of white roses, a mat of pink and scarlet geraniums. Above the steps you could see palm trees, purple blossoms, and a lemon tree, its globes like gold disks in the sun.
    “It’s plastic,” said Janey sardonically, and drew in just past the garden and halted.
    The antique and art businesses, it was clear, were doing all right. Austin Mandleberg’s antique shop and gallery was three stories high, with an open, arched door with a fanlight which gave onto a deep pillared hall, paved with black-and-white marble and dotted with eight-foot jugs, young palm trees in them. Against the wall on the left were two antique chairs flanking a large paneled door and a Spanish lantern that would have floodlit a ship. On the right wall was merely a small painted door, closed. Straight ahead, a palatial set of white marble steps rose up and