The Mortdecai Trilogy (13 page)

‘Are you not thirsty?’ the old lady suddenly asked.

‘Eh? Oh, well, er –’

‘Then why do you not ring for a servant?’

She knew bloody well why I did not ring for a servant, the old bitch. I did ring for one then, though, and a strapping hussy appeared wearing one of those blouses – you know, the ones with a sort of drawstring or rip-cord – bearing a tall glass full of something delicious.

I inclined politely toward the Countess before taking the first sip. This, too, proved a mistake, for she gave me a basilisk stare as though I’d said, ‘Cheers, dears.’

It occurred to me that I should tell her my name, so I did and a certain limited thaw set in; clearly, I should have done this before.

‘I am Mr Krampf’s mother-in-law,’ she said suddenly and her toneless voice and impassive face somehow carried words of contempt for people named Krampf. And for people named Mortdecai, too, for that matter.

‘Indeed,’ I said, with just a hint of polite incredulity in my voice.

Nothing happened for some time except that I finished my drink and summoned the courage to ring for another. She already had me summed up as a low-life; I felt she might as well know me for a toper as well.

Later, a barefoot peon crept in and mumbled to her in thick Spanish, then crept out again. After a while she said, ‘My daughter is now in and wishes to see you,’ then closed her parchment eyelids with finality. I was dismissed. As I left the patio I distinctly heard her say, ‘You will have time to couple with her once before dinner, if you are quick.’ I stopped as though I had been shot in the back. C. Mortdecai is not often at a loss for words but a loss is what he was at then. Without opening her eyes she went on – ‘Her husband will not mind, he does not care to do it himself.’

There was still nothing in this for me. I let the words hang reverberating in the still air while I slunk away. A servant fielded me neatly as I entered the house and led me to a small tapestry-hung chamber on the first floor. I sank into the most sumptuous sofa you can imagine and tried to decide whether I was sunstruck or whether the old lady was the family loony.

You will not be surprised, percipient reader, to learn that when the tapestries parted the girl who entered the room was the girl I had seen on the stallion. I, however, was very surprised, for when I had last met Mrs Krampf – in London, two years before – she had been a villainous old boot wearing a ginger wig and weighing in at some sixteen stones. No one had told me that there was a later model.

Retrieving my eyes, which had been sticking out like chapel hat pegs, I started to scramble to my feet, making rather a nonsense of it what with my short legs and the unreasonably deep sofa. Upright at last, and rather cross, I saw that she was wearing what I suppose I shall have to describe as a Mocking Smile. Almost, one could imagine a red, red rose between her Pearly Teeth.

‘If you call me “amigo,”’ I snapped, ‘I shall scream.’ She raised an eyebrow shaped like a seagull’s wing and the smile left her face.

‘But I had no intention of being so, ah,
fresh
, Mr Mortdecai, nor do I care to ape the speech of these Mexican savages. The
pistolero valiente
disguise is a whim of my kooky husband’ – she had a wonderfully fastidious way of using Americanisms – ‘and the pistols are something to do with castration complexes: I do not care to understand, I have no interest in Dr Freud and his dirty mind.’

I had her placed now: Viennese Jewess, the loveliest women in the world and the cleverest. I pulled myself together.

‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘Please let us start again. My name is Mortdecai.’ I put my heels together and bowed over her hand; she had the long and lovely fingers of her race and they were as hard as nails.

‘Mine is Johanna. You know my married name.’ I got the impression that she pronounced it as infrequently as possible. She motioned me back into the sofa – all her gestures were beautiful – and stood there, legs astride. Looking up at her from the depths of that bloody sofa was awkward; lowering my gaze I found myself staring at her jean-gripped crotch, fourteen inches from my nose. (I use fourteen in the Borgesian sense of course.)

‘Those are beautiful pistols,’ I said, desperately. She did something astonishingly swift and complicated with her right hand and, simultaneously it seemed, a Tiffany butt was six inches from my face. I took it from her respectfully – look, the Dragoon Colt is over a foot long and weighs more than four pounds: unless you’ve handled one you can’t begin to understand the strength and skill you need to flip it about casually. This was an intimidating young woman.

It was indeed a very beautiful pistol. I spun the cylinder – it was loaded in all chambers but, correctly, one nipple was uncapped for the hammer to ride on. There was much splendid engraving and I was startled to see the initials J.S.M.

‘Surely these did not belong to John Singleton Mosby?’ I asked, awestruck.

‘I think that was his name. A cavalry raider or something of that sort. My husband never tires of telling how much he paid for them – for myself, I forget, but it seemed an excessive amount.’

‘Yes,’ I said, cupidity stabbing me like a knife. ‘But are these not rather big weapons for a lady? I mean, you handle them beautifully but I should have thought something like a Colt Lightning or the Wells Fargo model perhaps …?’

She took the pistol, checked the position of the hammer and prestidigitated it back into the holster.

‘My husband insists on these big ones,’ she said, boredly. ‘It is something to do with the castration complex or the organ inferiority or some such nastiness. But you must be thirsty, my husband tells
me you are
often
thirsty, I shall bring you some drink.’ With that she left me. I began to feel a bit castrated myself.

She was back in about two minutes, having changed into a minimal cotton frock and followed by a drinks-laden peon. Her manner, too, had changed and she sank down beside me with a friendly smile.
Close
beside me. I sort of inched away a bit. Cringed away would be better. She looked at me curiously for a moment, then giggled.

‘I see. My mother has been talking to you. Ever since she caught me when I was seventeen wearing nothing under my dress she has been convinced that I am a mare in heat. It is not true.’ She was making me a large, strong drink – the peon had been dismissed. ‘On the other hand,’ she continued, handing me the glass with a dazzling smile, ‘I have an unaccountable passion for men of your age and build.’ I simpered a little, making it clear that I recognized a joke and perhaps a mild
tease
.

‘Tee hee,’ I said. Then ‘Aren’t you having a drink?’

‘I never drink alcohol. I do not like to blunt my senses.’

‘Goodness,’ I babbled, ‘but how awful for you. Not drinking, I mean. I mean, imagine getting up in the morning knowing that you’re not going to feel any better all day.’

‘But I feel lovely all day, every day. Feel me.’ I spilled quite a lot of my drink.

‘No, really,’ she said, ‘
feel
.’

I gingerly prodded a golden, rounded forearm.

‘Not there, stupid: here!’ She flipped a button open and two of the most beautiful breasts in the world sprang out, quite bare, hard and richly nippled. In all civility I could not decline to grasp one, indeed, my hand made the decision for me. My castration complex had vanished like an evil dream. She pulled my head down to her.

Much as I enjoy kissing girls’ nipples, I must say I usually feel a bit sheepish about it, don’t you? I’m reminded of fat old men sucking juicily at their teat-like cigars. However, the extravagance of Johanna’s response to my first tentative grazing on her lovely pastures was such as to dispel all embarrassment from my mind, replacing it with fears for my own health. She reared up like a tortured cat and wrapped herself around me as though she were in the last extremities of drowning. Her slim, calloused fingers grasped me with delicious ferocity and I soon ascertained
that her policy on underwear had not changed since she was seventeen.

‘Wait,’ I said urgently, ‘shouldn’t I take a shower first? I’m filthy.’

‘I know,’ she snarled, ‘I love it. You smell like a horse. You
are
a horse.’

Obediently, I broke into a canter, urged by her drumming heels. I was glad she had taken her spurs off.

Descriptions of middle-aged art dealers being ravished are neither instructive nor edifying, so I shall draw a row of ‘
frissons
’ like a shower curtain across the extraordinary scene which followed. Here they are:

I was shown to my room by the barefooted hussy in the drawstring blouse. She smiled at me blandly, pointing her lavish bosom like a pair of pistols.

‘I am at your service while you stay at the Rancho, señor,’ she said guilelessly. ‘My name is Josefina – that is, like Josephine.’

‘How apt,’ I murmured, ‘in the circumstances.’

She didn’t get it.

As the Countess had predicted, I was just in time for dinner. Changed and bathed, I sat down feeling more like the C. Mortdecai we know and love but I admit to having felt a little chary, a little
coy
, about meeting the old lady’s eye. As it happened, she avoided catching mine; she was a dedicated food eater, it was a pleasure to sit in front of her.

‘Tell me,’ I said to Johanna as the second course appeared, ‘where is your husband?’

‘He is in his bedroom. Next to the little dressing room where I, ah, received you.’

I stared at her in panic – no sensate human being could have slept through the zoo-like racket of our coupling. Seeing my consternation she laughed merrily.

‘Please do not worry about it. He did not hear a thing, he has been dead several hours.’

I don’t really remember what we had for dinner. I’m sure it was delicious but I seemed to have difficulty swallowing and I kept on dropping knives, forks and things. ‘Quaking’ is the only word for what I was doing. All I remember is the old Countess opposite me,
cramming the groceries into her frail body like one who provisions a yacht for a long voyage. ‘
Cur quis non prandeat hoc est?
’ seemed to be her attitude.

We had reached the port and walnuts stage before I recovered enough aplomb to venture another question.

‘Oh yes,’ Johanna replied indifferently, ‘it will have been his heart, I suppose. The doctor lives thirty miles away and is drunk; he will come in the morning. Why do you eat so little? You should take more exercise. I will lend you a mare in the morning, a gallop will do you good.’

I became scarlet and silent.

The old lady rang a silver bell which stood by her place and a whey-faced priest stole in and said a long Latin grace to which both the women listened with bent heads. Then the Countess rose and made her way with fragile dignity to the door, where she let out a fart of such frightening power and timbre that I feared she had done herself a mischief. The priest sat down at the end of the table and began gobbling nuts and guzzling wine as though his life depended on it. Johanna sat smiling dreamily into space, presumably envisaging a blissfully Krampf-free future. I certainly hoped she was not envisaging any bliss which would involve my participation in the near future: all I wanted was some Scotch and a big fat sleeping pill.

It was not to be. Johanna took me by the hand and led me off to see the corpse, much as one might be taken to see the ornamental waterfowl in an English house. Krampf lay naked and nasty and very dead indeed, displaying all the signs of a massive coronary occlusion, as the thriller writers say. (There are
no
outward signs of death by massive coronary occlusion.) On the carpet beside his bed lay a little silver box which I remembered; it always held his heart pills. Krampf had gone to join Hockbottle: dicky tickers, both of them. To name but a few.

His death solved a few problems and created a few more. There was something about the situation which I could not, at that stage of the evening, quite define, but I knew that the word ‘trouble’ figured in it somewhere. Feeling sure that Johanna would not mind, I drew back the sheet which covered him: there was no mark of violence on his lardy body. She came and stood on the other side of the bed and we looked down at him dispassionately. I had lost a rich
customer; she had lost a rich husband; there was little quantitative difference between our sorrows and the qualitative difference was that she, presumably, stood to gain a lot of money and I stood to lose some. Had Krampf been alive he would have felt like Jesus Christ between the two thieves, and indeed, death had lent him a certain spirituality, a certain waxy saintliness.

‘He was a dirty ape,’ she said at last. ‘Also base and greedy.’

‘I am all those things,’ I answered quietly, ‘yet I do not think I am like Krampf was.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He was mean in a shabby, tight-fisted way. I do not think you are mean like that, or at all. Why should rich men be mean?’

‘I think it is because they would like to stay rich.’

She thought about that and didn’t like it.

‘No,’ she said again. ‘His greed was not of that sort. It was other people’s lives he was greedy for: he collected his fellow men like postage stamps. He did not really want the stolen picture which you have in the cover of the Rolls Royce: it was you he was buying. You would never have got free from him after this deal. You would have been kissing his pimply behind for the rest of your life.’

This upset me very much. First, even Krampf could not have known – should not have known – just where the Goya was supposed to be hidden; second, here was yet another person apparently manipulating me instead of
vice versa
; third, this was a woman, for God’s sake, deep into the conspiracy and bubbling over with dangerous facts. Krampf had always been rash but he knew the basic rules of villainy. How on earth had he sunk to the point of telling things to a woman?

The whole complexion of Krampf’s death changed; before, it had been an extreme awkwardness, now it was a peril. With all this dangerous knowledge surging about so freely there were dozens of motives for killing him when previously there had only been one: Martland’s.