The Mortdecai Trilogy (26 page)

I retired early to the narrow bed in my dressing-room, for I needed to digest and furiously to muse and plan. I heard Johanna open the door a fraction – I made convincing zizzing-noises and she crept away. I heard the merest rattle and clink as she dropped her tiara into the jewel-box, then all was silence.

I continued to muse and plan. By the time I fell asleep I had formulated a tripartite plan:

(1) Obtain an impenetrable disguise.

(2) Select a sniper’s post.

(3) Arrange an escape-route.

Something attempted, something done had earned a night’s repose and a night’s repose was what I got, broken only by those contented noises from the digestive tract familiar to all who have dined at Isow’s. Well, I had some nasty dreams, too, but I have always maintained that relating one’s dreams is the third most boring a man can do. I need not tell you what the other two are.

O purblind race of miserable men,
How many among us at this very hour
Do forge a lifelong trouble for ourselves,
By taking true for false, or false for true!

 

Garaint and Enid

 

The suit was dreadful, quite dreadful. Clearly, it had been made for a colour-blind Roumanian pimp or perhaps ponce in the 1940s. The checks of the blue-and-orange pattern were, it must be admitted, not much larger than an ordinary packet of cigarettes: perhaps the pimp or ponce had been aiming at an inconspicuous effect. There were no dirty postcards in the pockets, nor any factory-reject french letters: this reassured me that it had at least been to the dry-cleaners. I bought it in a shop called GENTS’ WARDROBES PURCHASED and indeed its folds draped themselves from my shoulders in just the manner of a plywood wardrobe. GENTS’ WARDROBES PURCHASED also sold me a pair of shoes to match, although these, in their brown-and-white splendour, seemed to date from an even earlier day – a fortune-hunting petty nobleman might well have sported them in the
Salon Privé
at Monte in, say, 1936.

I glanced just once at myself in their fitting-room mirror: under the bludgeonings of suit I may have winced but I swear I did not cry aloud.

There seemed to be no end to the resources of GENTS’ W.P. ‘Vere,’ I asked in my best Mittel-Europ accent, ‘Vere could I buy a goot, strong, musical-instrument case for my musical instrument? I vould need vun of about
so
big’ – even as I gestured, the hateful suit sliced cruelly into my armpits – ‘ze kind dot ze Shicago gangsters used to carry dere sob-moshine gons in, ha ha!’

‘Have you come to the right place!’ cried Mr G.W.P. merrily. ‘Step this way, sir, mind the step; we make a little speciality of musical-instrument cases. There now, I’m sure you’ll find the box of your dreams amongst this little lot!’ I gave him a suspicious squint, for everyone knows that ‘box’ has another and naughtier meaning, but he did not seem to be pulling my plonker. There was in truth great store of stoutly-constructed musical-instrument kennels; it was a rare and bizarre sight. I had the measurements of the Mannlicher in my mind’s eye (any art-dealer worth his salt can glance at a frame and tell whether it will fit any picture in his stock or whether it can or cannot be cut down to size without altering the sweep of the carving) and I soon selected a perversely-shaped box or case designed, I don’t doubt, for a baritone saxophone and haggled over it just long enough to avoid arousing suspicion in G.W.P.’s breast.

I stuffed my execrable gents’ natty suiting and co-respondent shoes into the instrument-case and homeward plodded my moody way, as weary as any Stoke Poges ploughman, pausing only at Lillywhite’s to buy a checkered golfing-cap of the sort which I had until then believed only to exist in the works of P.G. Wodehouse. I used my Yorkshire accent in Lillywhite’s, to throw them off the scent, d’you see. The secret-agent cloak was by now falling across my shoulders so snugly that I felt like an ivy-mantled tower. I aroused, I believe, no suspicion; even without the accent they would have taken me for a North-Country man, no other would buy such a cap.

Jock flicked a baleful eye on the instrument-case when I arrived at the flat. The other, non-baleful eye, the glass one, was pointed at the empyrean or ceiling in a way which suggested that, could it speak, it would have said, ‘Oh my Gawd.’

‘Pray put this banjo-coffin into the wardrobe in my dressing-room,’ I said in dignified, masterly tones, ‘and I beg you not to
glance inside, for the contents shock even me: the effect of them upon an honest ton of soil like yourself …’

‘You mean “son of toil”, Mr Charlie.’

‘Perhaps I do, perhaps I do. Be that as it may, tell me now, without evasion and in your own words, omitting no detail however slight, what is for dinner tonight?’

‘Madam is out,’ he said smugly. ‘Playing bridge.’

‘So?’ I said haughtily. ‘Are you trying to tell me that I must send out or, God forbid,
go
out for dinner? Is there nothing in the pantry? Are you, Jock, supping off bread and cheese? I find this hard to believe, for you were ever one to eat above your station in life.’ His eyes glowered, one at the floor, the other at the cornice, above his station in life.

‘I was just going to have a bit of a snack,’ he mumbled in as civil a voice as he could muster.

‘Yes?’ I prompted gently.

‘Yeah, well, a coupla
blintzes
with caviar inside and some sour cream what I found left over, didn’t I, and a few kipper fillets soused with wine I bought out of my own pocket and I can prove it; then nothink but a Minute Steak what was going to waste, wrapped round a liddle concodgion of me own made out of chicken-livers and that.’

‘Are you trying to tell me,’ I said levelly, ‘that there is only enough for you?’ He pondered loyally awhile.

‘Bit short on the caviar side,’ he said at last. I handed him my keys.

‘Ten minutes OK, Mr Charlie?’

‘You mean ten minutes after you have produced the drinks tray?’

‘ ’Course.’

‘Then; right, Jock.’

‘Right, Mr Charlie.’

When Johanna returned I was in bed with an improving book by St Francis de Sales or perhaps Le Marquis de Sade, I forget which, and was not quick enough to snap out the bedside light. She had won at bridge, she always does; this elates her. She was radiant. She sang as she danced about the room, scattering garments both here and there.

We cannot all afford oysters and Guinness’s stout but I promise you that there are times when a little £20 jar of Beluga caviar will fill the gap admirably.

The next day, sure that Jock was in his pantry doing useful things and that Johanna was in the shower, I huddled on my new ‘clothes’ and was about to slink out of the flat unobserved. Johanna caught me in the very act of slinking and staggered about laughing like a little mad thing at the sight of my rainbow garb. She has one of those rippling, silvery laughs which are quite enchanting when they are directed at anyone but oneself.

‘Hush!’ I commanded. ‘If Jock sees me in this suit he will give in his notice. He has his pride, you see.’

‘But, Charlie, dearest,’ she murmured between one silvery ripple and another, ‘why are you dressed as an undertaker? And does the black, important box contain your embalming equipment?’

‘I see nothing to laugh at,’ I replied stiffly, ‘in the sight of a Briton true preparing to assassinate his Sovereign against his better judgment.’

‘I am sorry, Charlie,’ she said soberly. ‘I didn’t realize that you were in
disguise
.’

‘Well, I jolly well am,’ I said.

As I passed the kitchen there was a muffled, flatulent sound, too treble to be one of Jock’s.

‘Jock,’ I said sternly, ‘the canary is constipated again. I have no faith in the new vet. Pray telephone the Zoo and ask their advice.’

‘Right, Mr Charlie,’ he said – and then,
sotto voce
, he said something which sounded like, ‘Give him a look at your new suit.’

I walked – nay, slunk – for what seemed miles until I was well away from those parts of London where any friends of mine might live, then I hailed a taxi and directed it to the City, where there was only an outside chance that I might encounter my stockbroker or the chief of my Lloyds’ syndicate. In my pocket I had a map of the Royal Route which I had torn out of Jock’s newspaper, which is the kind of newspaper which Jock reads. (Fleet Street calls them ‘tit-and-bum rags’ but Jock is ever faithful to Shirley Temple; what he dearly loves, true-born Briton though he be, is those candid snapshots of junior royals taking an ‘arser’ from a
horse in a
puissance
trial. Perhaps he sometimes also spots the stick of type in the corner which tells of 15,000,000 homeless in West Bengal. Perhaps. His social conscience is a couple of notches higher than the World Council of Churches, but that’s about it.) In my pocket, as I was saying before you interrupted me, I had a map of the Royal Route. My
Times
had not specified in the ‘Court Circular’ – and probably would not say until after the event – which kind of vehicle Her M. would be travelling in but, since this was a State Occasion (a Reception and Luncheon at the Cordwanglers’ Hall with foreign royals present), I was hoping that the Royal Party would be in one of the State Landaus – open tops, you see – rather than in one of those great, weighty Daimlers or Rolls-Royces which every amateur assassin knows to be bullet-proof.

My newspaper route-map showed that the Royal Progress was to pass briefly through a grotty little City street on its way to Cordwanglers’ Hall and it was to that very street that I directed my cab, and there that I had the cabbie decant me, over-tipping him just enough to give him the impression that I was not a native son of London, but not enough to make him remember me. Those of you who have ever been unlucky enough to be a secret agent or hired assassin will understand how my mind was working.

Up and down the grotty street I toddled, the instrument-case bumping cruelly against my thigh, but not a single
BED AND BREAKFAST
sign could I descry. What I did descry on my third toddle was a tall, narrow-shouldered, grubby building with the name of a firm of solicitors on the ground-floor windows and an assortment of dirty lace curtains in the windows of the upper floors. A skinny slattern in curlers slouched in the basement area, listlessly pushing dirt about with what had once been a broom.

‘Goot mornink!’ I said, raising my golfing-cap in a Continental sort of way and smirking amiably. She looked up at me from the ‘area’; her eyes were those of a long-retired whore who had never really enjoyed her work.

‘’E’s out,’ she said, dismissively.

‘I voz wonderink –’

‘
Out
,’ she repeated. The atmosphere was heavy with the scent of overdue hire-purchase payments.

‘I voz wonderink vedder you might haff a small room I could use in ze evenings …’

‘Yer what?’

‘Ya, to play wiz my instroment, you onderstand.’

‘Yer
what?
’ I realized that, from her position down in the ‘area’, she could not see my saxophone-case and might have misconstrued me a bit. I raised the case and waggled it.

‘My vife,’ I explained, ‘doz not vish me to play wiz it at home any more. It makes her ongry wiz me.’

‘ ’Ungry?’

‘Ya,’ I said, inspired, ‘hongry. Then she eat too much, you understand, and become fat an dis spoil our loff-life pecoss I cannot stand fat vomen.’ I eyed her with undisguised admiration; she smoothed the ratty house-coat over her skinniness.

Ten minutes later I was the tenant of a second-floor room overlooking the street, having paid a modest rental one month in advance and having agreed that I should only practise my instrument during those hours when the solicitor downstairs was not practising law, that I should not entertain
friends
in the room and that I should not use the bathroom. There was a wash-hand basin in the room, you see, to receive any peremptory calls of nature.

At home that night I passed a hateful couple of hours with my tape-recorder and an album of some overpaid saxophonist of the early 1940s, recording bits and pieces of the fellow’s beastly art and repeating phrases again and again as though striving to achieve what a saxophonist would probably call perfection. I shall not name the musician for, who knows, he may well be alive to this day (there is no justice, none) and, to my certain knowledge, the Performing Rights Society is very much alive and poised like a pussy-cat at a mousehole.

For the next few days I played the part. The Great Game. Wore the mask. Worse, I wore the suit and, dear God, the very shoes. Each evening I would creep to that narrow house in that shabby street in the City, clad in the shameful attire, and mount the stairs after fluttering a lecherous eyelash or two at the landlady. Ensconced in the mean room, smelling of undernourished mice (yes, the
room
) I would play over the tape of the nameless saxophonist, occasionally varying the volume, stopping and starting and so forth, while I peered through the window, measuring angles and distances and
fields-of-fire until I could stand the bloody saxophone no more, whereupon I would shuffle downstairs, side-step the now clean and lipsticked but still skinny landlady, and pace moodily down the street towards a taxi-point. The moodiness of the pacing, I need hardly say, was because I was pacing out distances in the street and relating them to my field-of-fire. I reckoned that the State Landau would be clocking up a brisk 12 mph on the day. Trigonometry was the only thing I was good at when I was at school. Well, it was the only thing the masters
knew
about that I was good at.

Look, let me make it quite clear that I liked none of this at all, not any of it. I don’t speak of wearing clothes which George Melly would scorn, nor of the shoes, the ‘banana specials’ which still visit me in my dreams. I am speaking, seriously for once, of the basic rottenness of it all. This country had accepted my family, had been good to us, had allowed us to become moderately rich and had never pointed the finger of scorn. Why then was I using all my wits to send its Sovereign to a premature grave? Well, yes, my wife had told me to do it, which is a pretty good reason for most chaps to do most things, especially if, as in this case, there was a strong hint that I might find myself slightly dead if the product did not please. There was also the dread Colonel Blucher, who had made it clear that I was to play along with Johanna until otherwise instructed. None of this made me feel any better about my activities; I was sharply aware that Jock’s sense of values was better than mine.

However, in those days I was a man of iron, and was dedicated to the ideal of staying alive – an ideal which seems paltry in retrospect but seemed sensible at the time. Staying alive has a kind of immediacy about it: ask anyone who has been confronted with the choice between life and death.