The Mortdecai Trilogy (25 page)

(A) Your simple villain whose only task in the caper was nicking a get-away car just before the event and wiping the fingerprints or ‘dabs’ off it afterwards. He gets perhaps £500 in used one-pound notes and, regardless of his superiors’ warnings, splashes them about in his local pub, buying drinks for one and all. The boys in blue pick him up within 72 hours and kindly ask him to tell them the names of his superiors. He does not tell them, not out of honour-amongst-thieves but because his superiors have been too smart to let him know their names. This is unfortunate for the simple villain because the fuzz has to make quite sure that he does not know. He is often
tired
when he finally comes up before the magistrate.

(B) The slightly less simple villain with a sensible streak of cowardice who learns of the capture of villain (A) and, at dead of night, takes his £1000 in used notes, dumps them in the nearest public lavatory, telephone-kiosk or other evil-smelling place and,
in the morning, resumes his honest trade of scrap-metal merchant or whatever.

(C) The mealy-mouthed person who did nothing but ‘finger’ the caper slits open his Softa-Slumba mattress and tucks his £25,000 therein while his wife is getting her blue-rinse at the hairdressers. After eight or nine months, when he thinks all is safe, he buys a bungalow and pays the deposit in cash. Two nice gentlemen from the Inland Revenue call in for a chat; they go away quite satisfied. While he is heaving sigh of relief, two other nice gentlemen in blue uniforms call in for a chat and suggest that he pack a toothbrush and a pair of pyjamas.

(D) Now we are among the Brass, the higher echelons of the piece of villainy under discussion. This villain, called (D), is old-fashioned; he believes that a numbered account in a Swiss bank is as safe as the Houses of Parliament. He hasn’t heard about Guy Fawkes. He has heard about Interpol but he believes it is designed to protect chaps like him – chaps who have numbered accounts in Swiss banks. His trial is long, expensive and complicated. He gets a nice job in the prison library but
horrid
things happen to him in the showers.

(E) He thinks that he can run for it; he has two passports. His share is, perhaps, £150,000. His arithmetic is not good: that kind of money is very nice in, say, South Norwood, but it sort of dwindles as you scoot around the world at today’s prices, especially if you feel bound to arrange for your ever-loving wife to meet you in Peru or places like that.

(F) Yes, well, (F) is nearly the smartest of the bunch. First he tucks away a handy little sum like £20,000 in a safe place in case he gets nicked. (£20,000 will get you out of any prison in the world, everyone knows that.) Then he takes the rest of his ill-gotten g’s and, having bought a dinner-jacket far above his station in life, he joins one of those gaming-clubs where they sneer at you if you are seen with anything so plebeian as a £10 note. He buys a couple of hundred poundsworth of chips; plays at this table and that and, in the small hours of the morning, gives the lovely cashier-lady a handful of chips and bank-notes, say, £2000, telling her to credit his account. He gives her a tenner for herself and she assumes that he has won. He does this discreetly for months, sometimes seeming to lose but usually winning. Every once in a while the lovely cashier-lady tells
him that he has an awful lot of money in his account and he lets a big cheque which he can prove to be gambling-winnings slide into his account at the bank. You can legalize about a hundred thousand a year in this way if you are careful.

(G) He is the man who organized the whole thing. (G) is very rich already. There are no problems for him; his holding-companies can make his one-third of a million vanish like a snowflake on a frying-pan. I’m sure there’s a moral there somewhere.

If it comes to that, I daresay there’s a better moral in my book of Rembrandt etchings.

Back in my slum on the fourth floor in Upper Brook Street (W1) (I know it’s a duplex, but I still think it’s robbery at £275 a week) I was happily tipping-in my new purchase into the
Complete Etchings
when Jock sidled in.

‘Jock,’ I said severely, ‘I have repeatedly asked you not to sidle. I will not have this sidling. It smacks of the criminal classes. If you wish to better yourself you must learn to shimmer. What’s the name of those naval-outfitter chaps at the Piccadilly end of Bond Street?’

‘Gieves?’

‘That’s it. There you are, you see,’ I said, completely vindicated. Jock is not good at these things. He waited until I had fully relished my vindication; then he uttered.

‘I got what rows ’e wrote.’ I stared at the fellow. He showed none of the outward signs of brain-disease but these signs would not necessarily have been apparent, you see, for it is well known in art-dealing circles that you could stuff Jock’s brain into any hedgehog’s navel without causing the little creature more than a moment’s passing discomfort, while Jock, on his part, would not notice the loss until the next time he played dominoes.

‘What rows who wrote?’ I asked at length.

‘Nah,
Rosie
,’ he said, ‘me deaf-and-dumb mate. It’s his monniker.’

‘Goodness, is he one of
those
? How awkward for him, with his disabilities. I mean, however does he lisp and titter in sign-language?’

‘Nah. His whole monniker is Rosenstein or Rosinbloom or one of them Eyetalian names but he doesn’t like you to use it because he hates foreigners.’

‘I see. Well, let’s have it.’ He handed me a newspaper folded open at the Sports Page, around the margins of which Rosie had done his dictation. I gave him marks for camouflage: the only way a ruffianly publisher’s nark can be seen reading or writing without arousing suspicion is when he is at work picking his daily loser, and figuring out what a pound each way at nine to four will bring in after tax.

This is what he had written. ‘I cooden get sat were I cood see the Chink’s moosh but I cood see the lady ok she has lovly lips –’ I frowned here ‘– I cood read ever word she said.’ I unfrowned. ‘She said No Mr Lee i have explained befor I don’t want a million pounds. I already have a million pounds. I want the use of your organization. I have the women and you have the organization. I want to sell no part of my end. You will do very well out of your part of the operation. I can finance my self. Now for the last time is it a deal or not. Good. Now I must go shopping. I hav to buy my husband a present to put him in a good mood for what I am goin to ask him to do about the womin.’

I read it again and again. Aghast is the only word for what I was. Of course I had no illusion about Johanna’s saintliness – she was very rich, wasn’t she? – but the White Slave Trade! The sheer brilliance and audacity of reviving that wonderfully old-fashioned way of turning an honest million dazzled me. Johanna was, clearly, even cleverer than I had thought. The only bit that gnawed at my conscience was the suggestion that I was to be involved. It has always been my policy that wives should be free, nay, encouraged to do their own things but that spouses should not be conscripted. Let wives give cocktail parties until the distillery runs dry, but do not ask me to be polite to their awful friends. Let them take up knitting or some such wholesome exercise, but do not expect me to hold the wool. Above all, let them dabble in a little lucrative illegality – but on no account ask C. Mortdecai to participate except in helping to spend the proceeds with his well-known good taste.

White-slaving, you see, is strictly against the law. That is well-known. I might get
caught
; think how my friends would chuckle. Goodness, how they would chuckle if, after all the dubious capers I have survived, I were to be ‘sent up the stairs’ for living off the immoral earnings of naughty ladies.

I don’t know how the ordinary man in the street reacts to musing furiously for a few hours at having learned that his newly wedded
wife is a big wheel in the white-slaving trade. Some would doubtless fish out a little pocket calculator and start figuring percentages. Others would pack a bag and run for their lives. I would have telephoned Col. Blucher and told him all, but he had refused to give me any procedure for getting in touch with him for the nonce; this would come later, he promised me, but in the meantime I was to ‘play it by ear’. (He had translated this for me as: ‘Feel for your own handholds, Mortdecai; it’s only a very small mountain you have to climb. Just
kid
yourself that there’s a guy above you with a rope. You’ll make out. I guess.’)

Since that telephone call was denied me I adopted Alternative Plan B, which involves taking a firm handhold upon a bottle of Scotch and reading a few pages of the adventures of people called Mulliner, as related by the late P.G. Wodehouse. It was, after a while, difficult to concentrate because the doorbell rang and rang as obsequious chaps delivered huge cardboard boxes full of Johanna’s shopping-loot, but when she at last arrived in person I was mellowed by Mulliner tales and, I suppose, not a little soothed by the healing Scotch whisky. What I was not in was a honeymoon frame of mind.

She embraced me with all the innocent fervour of a bride who has never said anything to a Chinese restaurant-proprietor more compromising than a shy request for a doggy-bag. She ran in and out of the bedroom, ripping open valuable cardboard boxes and parading before me wearing their contents. I made suitable noises but my heart was not in it. To tell the truth, my conscience, with whom I had not been on speaking terms for twenty years, was murmuring that the boxes alone would have kept a starving stockbroker in cigars for a week. For her last trick she appeared in a piece of night-wear which made her previous night’s garment look like something a retired headmistress might wear in the Arctic Circle. I cringed.

‘Johanna,’ I said as she sat on my knee.

‘Mhm?’

I cleared my throat. ‘Johanna darling, is there anything good on the television tonight?’

‘No.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘There never is.’

‘But shall we just look at the newspaper to make sure? I mean, we might be missing an old Gary Cooper or Humphrey Bogart or …’

‘Tonight,’ she said in a firm but loving voice, ‘there is nothing whatever on the television. Unless …’ she cast an appraising eye on the large, solidly-built television set ‘ … well, I guess I could sort of lean over it? I mean, if you
really
want something on the TV?’

‘Try not to be immodest, I beg of you,’ I said in a distant, British sort of voice. ‘What you are trying to say, evidently, is that since there is nothing on the television you would prefer to spend the evening at the cinema.’

‘The movie-houses are all closed.’ I couldn’t tell her that she lied, could I? Nor could I explain, in so many words, that an hour or so watching
Naughty Knickers
or
Adventures of a Teenage Window-cleaner
might inflame me to the point where I could forget the terrifying wench-mongering trade in which she was about to involve me and summon up enough of the Old Adam to play the part of the lust-crazed bridegroom.

I made her two, or it might have been three, strong – hopefully soporific – drinks, then followed her to bed.

It was my duty to have loved the highest:
It surely was my profit had I known:
It would have been my pleasure had I seen.

 

Guinevere

 

Later that night, my confidence in the invigorating powers of the vitamins E and B12 once again ratified, I was sinking into a well-earned hoggish slumber when Johanna prodded me and said:

‘Charlie, little stallion, I want you to do something …’

‘Darling, we’ve only just … I mean, I’m not a young man, I’ve explained that before … perhaps in the morning, eh?’

‘Silly, I didn’t mean that; what do you think I am, a nymphomaniac or something?’

I mumbled something sort of reprieved and perhaps ungallant, nuzzling back sleepily between her warm, damp breasts.

‘What I want you to do is something
quite
different.’ I stirred; the words strained and sifted through the well-earned slumbrousness already referred to. Misgiving took me by the throat; I could almost feel my teeth rattle.

‘Darling Johanna,’ I said in as reasonable a voice as I could muster, ‘wouldn’t
tomorrow
night be a better time for anything, ah,
far-out
that you have in mind? I mean …’ she giggled.

‘Yes, Charlie dear, I know that you are no longer a young – although you could fool most people.’ I smirked. ‘In the dark, of course,’ she continued, spoiling it for me. ‘No, I don’t want you to tax your beautiful glands. Well, just the adrenalin ones maybe. I just want you to kill someone for me. OK.?’

‘Kill someone?’ I burbled sleepily. ‘Certainly. Any time. Slay a dragon or two with pleasure, any time. Any time after breakfast, that is. Got to get my sleep now, d’you see.’

She shook my shoulder, which only made me nuzzle more firmly, more determined to sleep. Then she shook a much more vulnerable limb and I awoke indignantly.

‘I say,’ I said, ‘don’t do that! Might damage a chap. And where would you be then, eh? Make a nonsense of your honeymoon, you can see that, I’m sure. G’night.’

She sat up in bed in a peremptory fashion, taking most of the bedclothes with her. There was nothing to do but awake. I awoke. I shall not pretend that my mood was mild.

‘My dear Johanna, this is neither the time nor the occasion for tantrums. All the world over, chaps and their charming bedmates are zizzing away for all they are worth, irrespective of colour or creed, coiling in the tissue-restoring eight or nine hours. You asked something of me which I agreed to accomplish tomorrow. Can’t recall what it was but I’m delighted to fall in with your lightest wish. Tomorrow. Whatever it is.’

‘Oh, Charlie, have you forgotten already? I simply asked you to kill someone for me. It doesn’t seem much to ask one’s bridegroom on one’s honeymoon. However, if it’s too much trouble …’

‘Not at all; don’t be petulant, darling. It’ll be the work of a moment, work of a moment. Just give Jock the feller’s name and address and he’ll see to it the day after tomorrow. Goodnight again, sweetheart.’

‘Charlie!’

‘Oh well, all right, I suppose he could manage it
tomorrow
night but he’ll have to scout about for a pistol with no history, you understand. I mean, I couldn’t ask him to use his own Luger on this feller, could I? You see that, surely?’

‘Charlie, the person to be killed isn’t a, uh, feller. In fact you’d probably think it improper to call her a person, even.’

‘You speak in riddles, Johanna of my heart,’ I sighed. ‘Who is this august “she” – the Queen of bloody England?’

She clapped her hands together, as pleased as a little girl.

‘Oh Charlie, you guessed, you guessed!’

I distinctly remember saying ‘good-morning’ to Jock next morning.

‘Good morning, Jock’ were the words I selected, for they never fail to please.

‘Morning, Mr Charlie,’ he rejoined, setting the tea-tray down within reach of my quaking hand. ‘Breakfast?’ he asked.

‘Buttered eggs, I think, please.’

‘Right, Mr Charlie. Scrambled eggs.’

‘Buttered eggs,’ I repeated (but Jock will not yield on this point of language) ‘and very runny. Do not agitate them too much, I detest the gravelly appearance: a well-buttered egg should appear as large, soft, creamy clots. Like Roedean schoolgirls,
you
know.’

‘Toast?’ was all the reaction I got out of him.

‘Well, of course toast. Toast-making is one of your few talents; I may as well get the good of it while you still have possession of your faculties.’

You can’t get through Jock’s guard – his riposte was like a flash of lightning. ‘And an Alka-Seltzer, I reckon?’ he said. Game, set and match to him, as ever.

‘Please salt the eggs for me,’ I said by way of conceding defeat, ‘I always overdo it and spoil them. And do please remember, the fine, white pepper for eggs, not the coarse-ground stuff from the Rubi’ (Cipriani of Harry’s Bar in Venice once told me why waiters of the better sort call that huge pepper-grinder a ‘Rubi’: it is in honour of the late, celebrated Brazilian playboy Porfirio Rubirosa. I don’t understand it myself because my mind is pure.)

Jock pretended not to be listening; this is an easy trick if you happen not to be listening and one quite unfair to an employer who is in the throes of struggling to the surface of wakefulness.

‘Sod him,’ I thought bitterly. Then I remembered.

‘By the way, Jock,’ I said casually … (If you happen to be a physician in General Practice, God forbid, you will be all too
familiar with the ‘By the way, Doctor’ gambit. It works like this: a chap is concerned because his left testicle has turned bright green, so he goes to his croaker or physician and complains of headaches and constipation. Having collected his prescriptions he starts to exit and then, his hand on the doorknob, turns back and casually mumbles ‘By the way, Doctor, it’s probably nothing of interest but …’)

‘By the way, Jock,’ I said casually, ‘Mrs Mortdecai wants the Queen shot.’

‘Awright, Mr Charlie. Did you say two eggs or three?’

‘The
Queen
,’ I insisted.

‘Yeah, I heard you. You mean the old ponce what runs the drag-club down Twickenham way. I’ll do him tomorrow night, no sweat. You’ll have to give me a score to buy an old throwaway shooter, though, I’m not using me good Luger.’

‘No, no, Jock. I refer to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the II, whom God preserve and upon whom the sun never sets, etcetera.” He fell silent; anyone who didn’t know him might well have thought that he was thinking.

‘Jock,’ I said sternly after a while, ‘your glass eye is leaking. Pray take it out and wipe it.’

‘ ’Tisn’t watering. It’s crying,’ he said in an ashamed but defiant voice.

‘Eh?’

‘Yeah, well, she’s a lovely lady, isn’t she? She never bought me no beer but she never did no one no harm, did she?’

I know how to deal with rhetorical questions; you don’t answer them.

‘Couldn’t we just do the Earl of –’

‘No!’

‘– or Princess – I mean no one would …’

‘The
Queen
,’ I said firmly. ‘For personal reasons, such as fear, cowardice, patriotism etcetera, I am as reluctant as you to perform this dastardly act but international politics says the deed must be done. So does my wife. Two eggs, please.’

‘Two eggs,’ he muttered, shambling out of the room.

How dearly I would have loved to sink back into innocent sleep but matters of great moment had me by the lug-hole and furthermore Jock sulks if I let my eggs grow cold. I ate them
up, every scrap, although they were far from perfect. As I ate, I planned.

An hour later, carelessly clad and deliberately unshaven, I went off to consult my gunsmith. I don’t mean my real gunsmith, of course; he is a bishop-like personage who presides over dim, hushed premises near St James’s Palace and knows the difference between a gentleman and a person. The chap I was going to see is what you might call my other gunsmith, a chap of great dishonesty who sells illegal firearms to
persons
and whose only work-bench skills are fitting new barrels to pistols which have been in a little trouble and sawing off a few inches from shotgun barrels. He believes me to be a sort of Gentleman Jim The Country House Jewel Thief and I have not thought fit to correct this belief. He does not know my name, naturally. His only points of principle are to refuse credit, to refuse cheques and to refuse to sell firearms to Irishmen. This last is not because he dislikes the Irish or their politics, but for their own good. He is not convinced that they will hold the weapon the right way round, you see, and he likes his customers to come back.

He greeted me with his usual surliness: dealers in illegal firearms almost never smile, you must have noticed that. He was discreetly clad in a filthy singlet and underpants and the carrotty hair with which he is matted was dark with sweat. He had been making toffee-apples, you see, for this is his ‘front’, and the darkened, poky room into which he admitted me was fiercely hot and heavy with the stench of boiling sugar, rotten fruit and gun-oil. The murmur of wasps and blow-flies in the immemorial toffee-vats was quite terrifying to me. (As a child I once swallowed a wasp in a glass of lemonade; it stung me on the left tonsil and my mother feared – in a half-hearted but well-bred way – for my life. Nowadays I
stamp
on wasps when the conservation chaps aren’t looking.)

‘Hello, Ginge!’ I cried.

‘Oy, mate,’ he replied.

‘Look, Ginge, do you think we could go into another room? I’m wearing silk underclothes, you see, and they’re horrid when one sweats.’

With ill grace he led me into a little, overstuffed back-parlour which was as icy as the workshop had been tropical. With unconscious grace he threw a stolen mink bolero around his
shoulders and squatted on a horsehair-covered tuffet. I must say he did look droll but I didn’t dare to snigger; he is very strong and rough and famous throughout the Borough of Poplar for hitting people in vulnerable parts on the smallest provocation.

“A friend of mine …’ I began.

‘Oh, ah,’ he sneered.

A friend of mine,’ I repeated firmly, ‘does a little commercial poaching – or culling – of deer in the Highlands of Scotland the Brave. He has a large standing order for venison from an hotel whose name I seem to forget. The police have taken his rifle away said are being stuffy about giving it back. He needs another. What have you got, Ginge?’

‘Nuffink,’ he said.

‘He’s a bit particular about his guns,’ I went on. ‘He likes something with a bit of class. And it’s got to be a stopper, a high-velocity job, something with real clout.’

‘I got nuffink like that.’

‘And the ammunition must be fresh; no stale old ex-army rubbish.’

‘I gotter go now, mate.’

‘And, of course, a good telescopic sight.’

‘Fuck off.’

So far, the dialogue was going well, the protocol was in the best tradition. Dealing with chaps like Ginge is extraordinarily like negotiating with a Soviet Trade Delegation. I fished out the flat half-bottle of whisky and tossed it to him. He drank from the bottle, dirty dog, and didn’t pass it back. He belched, thrust a hand into his underpants and scratched thoughtfully.

‘Got a Mannlicher,’ he grunted after another swig. I made a sympathetic face and suggested a course of penicillin. He ignored that.

‘Pre-war.’

‘No.’

‘Clip holds three.’

‘Useless.’

‘Belonged to a Count.’

‘A
what?
’

‘Count. What they call a Graf. Got a coat of arms on the lock-plate, all in gold and stuff.’

‘Worse and worse.’

‘And it ain’t never been in no trouble. Guarantee.’

‘You begin to half-interest me, Ginge.’

‘Two hundred and eighty quid. Cash.’

I stood up. ‘Next millionaire I meet I’ll tell him about it. Cheers, Ginge.’

‘Lovely Zeiss ’scope on it, x 2½.’

‘x 2½!’ I squeaked (you try squeaking the phrase ‘ x 2½’). ‘That’s no use, is it?’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you need more than that on ’scope you don’t want a rifle, you want a bleeding anti-aircraft gun.’

I began to sulk in good earnest and he sensed it instantly; he has that sixth sense which stands Armenian carpet-dealers in such good stead. He stole out and returned with a slim, elegant leather case which he dumped into what I still like to call my lap. It contained the Mannlicher in three easily assembled parts; the sniperscope, a fitted torch for shooting crocodiles or mistresses by night, and two hundred pounds of pretty fresh 7.65 mm ammunition, not to mention a rosewood cleaning-rod, a silver oil-bottle, a crested silver sandwich-box, a roll of 4″ × 2″ flannelette and a tool-kit complete with the thing for picking Boy Scouts out of Girl Guides’ knickers. It was quite beautiful; I longed to own it.

‘You could get a fortune for this from an antique-dealer,’ I yawned, ‘but my friend wants something to shoot things with. No one has used a toy like this since Goering roamed the primeval swamps.’

‘Two hundred and seventy-five quid,’ he said, ‘that’s me last word.’

Twenty minutes, two bursts of ill temper and half a bottle of Scotch later, I left owning the rifle and having paid two hundred pounds, which we had both known all along was what I was going to pay.

‘What’s that old load of rubbish for then?’ asked Jock surlily when I brought it home.

‘It’s what we’re going to do that job with.’

‘You can. I’m not,’ he said.

‘Jock!’

‘I’m British. By the way, it’s me night off, innit, and I’m off playing dominoes. There’s some cold pork in the fridge. Madam’s out, gorn to some pub called the Clarence House.”

I waved an icy, dismissive hand. Things were bad enough without having to bandy words with uppity servants who couldn’t muster up enough loyalty to join their indulgent masters in so traditional an old English practice as a spot of regicide.

The cold pork in the fridge was wilting at the edges; it and I exchanged looks of mutual contempt, like two women wearing the same hat in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. I changed into a slightly nattier suit and went off to Isow’s, where I ate more than was good for me. One always does at Isow’s, but it’s worth it.