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

swirled to the right, showing a lot of elaborate wrought-iron balustrade. A neat notice at the foot of the steps said, simply, gallery 7 , and another, to one side of the paneled door, said Austin M. Mandleberg. I pulled off my headscarf and got out.
    I’d changed to pink slacks and a long-sleeved, chain-store blouse, with a heavy link belt I take everywhere. Janey was in thin, ice-pink suede, sleeveless and fringed at the ends. She had one pale square ring and a pair of thin, twisty gold earrings. It wasn’t that she was making a special effort for Austin. Janey makes a special effort all the time.
    She walked straight in and opened the door on the left, while I hung about after, catching it as it crashed back behind her. She didn’t warn me that there were three sunken steps just inside. I nearly landed in Austin’s antique shop on my pink Courtelle pelvis.
    The little man with dark crinkly hair who came forward to greet us turned out to be Señor Gregorio. The resident manager wore a tight-fitting suit and white collar. He had a big nose and bushy eyebrows and bags under his eyes you could have kept shoes in. He had hardly finished cooing over Janey when Austin ran down the steps, came across, and kissed both our hands. Continental stuff. Then he took us around.
    Actually, I can’t tell you a thing about that room, because I was so sorry for Austin. I mean, he’d be busy talking about an alabaster coffer with the apostles carved inside the lid, or some Punic pottery, or a silk shawl, or a bunch of swords, or a painted Saint Peter, or some old maps and keys and pieces of spidery embroidery, and there was Janey —making challenging statements which had nothing whatever to do with what he was saying and making him laugh when he knew he was supposed to be talking to me. I got in a few shots as well, but Janey nicked the ball whenever I paused to draw breath, and it was such a pain in the neck watching poor Austin’s native American courtesy struggling with his commercial desire not to offend the daughter of a confirmed ikon buyer that I dropped out of the game and lingered around,watching him topping his drives.
    Anyway, Janey was the expert on antiques. Going about with Daddy, of course I’ve picked up a bit, and when I’m around cooking in a decent-sized house, I know what to admire. But of course Janey had been finished and trailed all through the Uffizi. The first man she ever went to bed with was a waiter in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele: she said she didn’t want to practice on her friends.
    At any rate, we took ages to get to the silver, which was the only bit that seemed faintly interesting, and when we did, Janey and I both did our stuff well enough, anyway, to be presented with two dangling chain earrings apiece. Austin was still standing there, flushed with the success of his great thought, when Gregorio appeared, beaming, and took Austin off to the telephone.
    He was away for a while. Janey sniffed around and after a bit, started opening cupboards and trying things on. I felt in a mood for adventure and walked up the steps and back into the hall again. I tossed up, mentally, between the marble stairs and the little green door in the opposite wall: and in the end picked the door.
    I crossed the hall, which was empty, and turned the door handle. It opened. Inside was a dark flight of steps running downward, with a half-landing and a twist at the bottom. I went down, out of curiosity, but it only gave onto a long, dirty corridor leading to rooms where Gregorio or someone probably lived. The door at the foot of the stairs was half-open, but that was a dead loss as well: an empty workroom, full of benches and litter, with one or two bits of jewelry being mended or cleaned or something. An old man, who had been hidden inside a cupboard, moved out, and I scuttled before he could see me. A pity. I felt a view of Austin Mandleberg’s bedroom, for instance, would have put me definitely one up in the race. I bet