Scoundrels

by Victor Cornwall

  “Chadwell is a liability,” said Lunk gravely. “Whitehall wants to know how the hell he is doing it.”

  As well as being a liability, Chadwell was a workaholic. He had once spent seven months without leaving the Oriental Study Rooms, and nobody could remember ever seeing him outside the Museum. He was so obsessed with his Tan farming implements that he would sometimes be found asleep with them in the narrow cot he kept in his office off the galleries. When the hell did he have time to pass information on to the Japanese? We needed to have eyes on him every moment of the day, to establish what his trick was.

  Lunk, Cornwall and I talked round this subject, examining it from every plausible angle, and a few implausible ones to boot. We may seem very dynamic, but Scoundrels act quickly only when required. Given the luxury of time we’d rather consider every option. So we piled into the Remy, and then had Marwood open another bottle, considering all sorts of outlandish options. Could we ‘wire him up’, using the new portable listening devices that we’d heard so much about at Bertie Nagel’s lecture last month? Nope. They were clunky and could record only an hour at a time. Plus the smallest recording unit was the size of a suitcase. The chance of catching Chadwell passing secrets on tape was negligible.

  Could we put a gorgeous young research filly into his department, to tempt him? Sadly not. Chadwell had been rendered impotent by a Queens’ College punting accident as an undergraduate. The fairer sex did nothing for him.

  Then, scratching the dark dome of his head, Lunk suggested that we learn a little of the Professor’s areas of specialism, to see if we could find a clever way to catch him out. He took more photos from the cerise file and dumped them onto the table. Burmese temples, Chinese jade, Tibetan prayer mats, Japanese war shields etcetera. There were some nice pieces in the B.M. collections, but nothing of any use to us.

  Hang on. What did we have here?

  I scooped up a handful of black and white photos from a peasant farming community – Korea? China? – and rifled through them. Flat landscape. Undernourished cattle. A plough set aside. A great hole in the field. A young Chinese peasant boy, solemnly holding the thing he’d pulled from his family field: the muscled arm of a warrior. The rest of the photos also showed body parts, each approximately life-sized.

  “All of them are made of clay, apparently” confirmed Lunk, “great lumps of terracotta clay.”

  Cornwall leant in for a closer look. One photo showed half of the head of a fearsome moustachioed warrior, held up by the delighted Chinese woman who’d discovered it. Another showed an entire leg covered in armoured plates with a sandalled foot on the end. Another showed a torso, with arms and legs broken off.

  “The Chinese keep digging these things up all over Shaanxi,” noted Lunk.

  I began to feel the glimmer of an idea coming on. “Have they ever dug a complete terracotta fellow from the ground?”

  Lunk was a widely read chap, and had a gentleman’s knowledge of archaeology. “Not yet. These arms and legs are ten-a-penny though. It stands to reason a whole warrior will turn up before too long.”

  “I suppose it does,” I said, lighting my last Poor Boy, a light Virginian filtered brightleaf that I’d had the Scoundrels’ tobacconist whip up to wile away my convalescence. “Or perhaps they’ll find two of them...”

  Cornwall and Lunk caught on immediately, and they started to laugh.

  Scoundrels Basement, One week later

  I could hear Cacahuete struggling to get through the door with another barrow of Hyde Park clay. Good, we’d need it. The bath was nearly full. I’d mixed the paint, powdered copper and bronze filings and I’d poured in twenty-two pints of water, three fewer than last time which had been too sloppy. Stuffinch continued to stir it vigorously with his oar. The red terracotta slurry emitted a noxious burp. Surely this time we’d have it right. “We’re ready for you,” I called.

  Cornwall stepped out from behind the Chinese screen, and dropped his robe on the floor. He was stark naked but for an adapted tackle chappie covered in horsehair and sheep grease, Gingerly, he stepped into the bath and submerged himself into the thick soup.

  “Up you get,” I called out after exactly ninety seconds, and kicked the side of the bath in case he couldn’t hear. Cornwall surfaced like some sort of undernourished hippo and took a huge gulp of air. Then he stood and raised his arms so they were out of the way. The sticky clay clung to his torso and thighs. “Good. And over to you Ruff Puff.”

  Barely concealing his enthusiasm, Ruff Puff adjusted his sculpting beret and went to work on the clay that clung to Cornwall’s frame. With a short wooden tool, he began to roughly section it into the costume of an ancient soldier: breastplate, tunic, and pantaloons. Working to my stopwatch, he began to set out buttons and clasps, and a diagonal sash.

  “That’s a full minute, Ruff Puff! Hurry up.”

  “Ith drying too fathst. Itth cracking! We need more moisthure.”

  I threw a bucket of iced water at Cornwall, and the tiny cracks in the drying terracotta closed up. Ruff Puff dropped his wooden tool and began to smooth Cornwall’s chest with his fingers, paying particular attention to his nipples and belly button. He was one hell of a talented artist. The way he smoothed his hands so lithely around Cornwall’s chest was poetic. It was like watching Michaelangelo working on il David.

  Breathing heavily, he smeared new terracotta sludge onto Cornwall’s midriff.

  “Ruff Puff! Hands above the waist!” called an unamused Cornwall.

  “You’th got a themi, Mithter Cornwall, I abtholutely thwear.”

  “Time!” I called. “Next layer please. Deep breath Cornwall…” Cacahuete and Stuffinch stepped forward grabbed Cornwall by the shoulders and plunged him backwards into bath number two.

  “Okay Ruff Puff. Get busy on his buttocks. And make sure the clay goes all the way up.”

  “Oh yeth, I thertainly will, I thertainly will,” grinned Ruff Puff, happily.

  How do you turn a Scoundrel into an ancient Chinese terracotta soldier? We’d spent every waking hour at the Club for the last week working this out. We’d played games of musical statues that lasted for six or seven hours. We’d practised torturous lung exercises until we could breathe without moving our chests even a half-inch. Rudi Dentwist, a bit of a technical whizzkid, had knocked up wafer thin contact lenses that made our eyes look like stone. The reasoning was clear. If we could keep still for long enough in our clay disguises, we’d catch Professor Chadwell passing secrets to the Japanese.

  Both Cornwall and I turned out to be shockingly poor at sculpting so Ruff Puff had agreed to give us some artistic direction. We needed a minimum of eight layers of terracotta on our bodies if we wanted to fool anyone that we were actual warriors from a bygone age. His artistic skills were beyond doubt, but where Ruff Puff really excelled was in giving the new terracotta an antique patina, as if we’d lain in the ground for millennia. He also seemed to instinctively know what a two thousand year old Chinese warrior would look like. He’d given Cornwall a bulbous nose, hangdog moustache and a tufted hair-do. He’d even made his eyes too close together, just like in real life. His design for me included a lump of extra clay to weigh down my enviably lustrous locks, which he’d teased into a Rita Hayworth-style side parting. Ruff Puff also gave me sensual lips and a tiny goatee beard with a devilish point.

  Our cover story was that we’d been brought back from China in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion of the late nineteenth century and sold to the first Earl of Felbrigg, languishing in a Dorset country house ever since. Now Lady Felbrigg wanted us gone, as our eyes followed her around the room. We’d been gifted to the British Museum, where we’d join the Benin Bronzes, the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone, and the pilfered artefacts of many other great nations.

  We would be delivered in packing crates to Russell Square at 09:00 the following day, and left in the Orien
tal Study Rooms to settle before going on display. We’d have a grandstand view of all the departmental goings-on.

  Of course, this meant that Cornwall and I would have to keep schtum for a good while, but we were no strangers to hardship and sacrifice – especially when so much was at stake. We’d catch Chadwell in a treacherous act, and then burst out ready to arrest him. It would probably take a couple of days, three at the outside.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  __________

  “One moment, ith gotta be perthect,” purred Ruff Puff, as he fiddled with the detail of my terracotta face. The semi-opaque contact lenses that fitted over my eyeballs gave everything a reddish tinge.

  Cornwall stood beside me, already Zen-like. His statue had been completed six hours ago, and he was drying out nicely in the heat of the Scoundrels basement. “There’s no more time, Ruff Puff,” admonished Lunk. “We’ve got to get them crated up and over to the museum, right now.”

  Lunk’s huge knuckle rapped on Cornwall’s clay forehead, as if he were knocking on the door of a bank vault. “Can you hear me in there? We’re about to move you to the Museum. There’s no going back. One tap for yes, two taps for no.”

  I heard a very faint TINK from Cornwall. Ruff Puff had left a tiny space so he could tap a finger against the inside of the clay carapace. I moved my left index finger fractionally too. TINK.

  “Right then, off you go. Good luck chaps. Just remember, you can smash your way out of these suits at any point. Try and get some sleep now, you’ve got a lot of surveilling to do.”

  The British Museum

  The drop-off had gone smoothly. Stuffinch and Cacahuete had rolled us down the wide marbled corridors and unpacked two magnificent terracotta warriors in the bookcase-lined Oriental Study Room. Here we stood, side by side against a panelled wall, with the whole department before us.

  “Sign for these blaady awld statchers please, squire,” called Stuffinch in his best Cockney accent to a rangy, stoop-necked chap who was making notes at a baize-covered desk.

  “Bless my soul! I didn’t realise they’d be up from Felbrigg so soon!” Professor Chadwell jumped up, very excited, like a boy taking delivery of his shiny racing bike. He scribbled on Stuffinch’s receipt, and polished his frameless spectacles on his tie, the better to look at us. I recognised the same tweed suit. It looked even worse than in the photograph.

  “Aren’t they splendid! Look Gladkins! Such naif detailing. Fetch me my briefcase, I must make notes…” Muttering to himself, Chadwell bustled over to a colossal bookcase stuffed with parchment, stone tablets and tomes. Behind him, a tiny, slightly wizened woman in a brown woollen cardigan brought over his briefcase. Chadwell’s assistant, Miss Gladkins, was almost as old as Chadwell himself. She didn’t say a word, and hobbled along with the aid of a thick walking stick.

  That was pretty much all that happened on our first day under cover, and we settled down into the torpor of museum life. Well, I say ‘settle’, for inside my clay skin it was not possible to get comfortable. Cornwall and I understood privation. We knew that for the next couple of days we would be standing constantly, unmoving, without being able to urinate, defecate, yawn or stretch. We’d be unable to eat or drink anything, speak or scratch an itch, or even take a deep breath.

  It was also a good deal hotter here than in the Scoundrels’ basement, as Stuffinch and Cacahuete had deposited us in front of a warm air vent. Still, it wasn’t forever. I concentrated on keeping my breathing as shallow as possible.

  As I say, the rest of that first day slid by slowly. We watched Chadwell bimble about the Oriental Study Room. He took his time as he moved through the desks, many with wobbling piles of books or piles of stone tablets. It took him upwards of twenty minutes to make a cup of tea. Often he would stop his shuffling and just stand in the middle of the room, lost in thought, as though some fascinating new theory about Korean moon jars had just occurred. Then, after an hour, he’d be off again, towards his bookcase or desk. He spent a lot of time rummaging around for half-remembered books that might shed light on some aspect of our design.

  All the while, moving even more warily than Chadwell, like the smaller of two fish in a rockpool, went Miss Gladkins with her brown cardigan and thick wooden stick. She’d creep quietly to the bookcase, and then drift slowly over to her desk, and then shuffle across to the window, which she’d adjust minutely, before meandering back to the bookcase again. It was almost hypnotic.

  The first night passed quietly too. Gladkins carefully buttoned up a brown trenchcoat and went off to catch her omnibus. Chadwell worked late, and then settled down onto a thin cot in a tiny cupboard behind the bookcases.

  The second day was much the same as the first. There were no visitors. Towards teatime Cornwall chanced a small cough, and also fractionally changed his foot position. Emboldened, I made an infinitessimally small neck movement, left to right, and was rewarded with a tiny crack from my vertebrae. I settled back down, thoroughly refreshed. We kept an eye out for any sign of wrongdoing on Chadwell’s part. I was expecting he’d have a radio stashed somewhere, or perhaps he’d be visited by a small exotic-looking gentleman. None of that happened. A beetle crawled over Cornwall’s foot.

  Perhaps forty-eight hours had been a little too optimistic. Chadwell was clearly a careful man. Seventy-two hours was probably about right though, for sure.

  __________

  As the sun went down on our third day I could see that seventy-two hours had also been optimistic.

  I can’t remember much about the fourth day, because lack of water meant severe ketosis had set in. Inside the clay shell, my body was now ruthlessly eating itself. The piece of parched chamois leather that used to be my tongue had attached itself to the roof of my mouth, impairing my breathing. Compounding this, a pair of wasps had found that terracotta nostrils make the perfect nest. They were busy excreting a gummy substance into my nasal cavity, so that the female could lay her eggs. This added to the oxygen debt that four days of shallow breathing brings. Still, I am a keen student of natural history, and I found the wasps’ homemaking fascinating, right up until the moment I lapsed into a coma.

  A coma that I snapped out of on the early morning of the fifth day when a dust mote settled at the exact point where my contact lens met my eyeball. The pain was extravagant, even operatic, but this extreme good fortune helped me remember that I was a Great Briton and a Scoundrel. Inside my mind, I gave myself a thorough talking to, admonishing myself in very strong terms for being weak – the very thing I detested most.

  Through sheer force of will, I managed to detach my tongue from the roof of my mouth, and when Chadwell was in the lavatory and Miss Gladkins’ back was turned, I blew several hundred tiny wasp eggs from my nostrils, after which I felt a good deal better.

  Our vigil continued into a fifth afternoon.

  __________

  There are two hundred and ten books with yellow spines on the bookshelves, and a further twelve books with yellow spines on the various desks in the Oriental Study Room. There are three hundred and eighty-six books with red spines on the bookshelves, and a further two books with red spines on the various desks in the Oriental Study Room. There are two hundred and seventeen books with white or off-white spines on the bookshelves, and twenty-four books with white or off-white spines on the desks, and an extra two books with white or off-white spines on the windowsill in the Oriental Study Room. There are six hundred and fifty-one books with blue spines on the bookcase, and a further seven books with blue spines on the desks in the Oriental Study Room. There are one hundred and seventy-two panes of glass in the mullioned windows above the bookshelves in the Oriental Study Room.

  __________

  Professor Chadwell spent the morning reading.

  A visitor arrived at eleven to borrow a book. My ears pricked up. Surely this was it. “I am Mr Waters, from the Anglo-Saxon Depar
tment. May I borrow this book please?”

  That didn’t sound like code.

  “Yes, of course,” said Chadwell, and returned to his own book.

  “Thank you,” said Mr Waters.

  Waters was the only visitor to the Oriental Department for the entire duration of our visit.

  __________

  Towards noon on the sixth morning I finally removed a tiny strand of beef that had been stuck between my left incisor and premolar. This was possible as my gums were receding.

  I hadn’t moved for nearly one-hundred and twenty-three hours but I remained resolute and utterly ready for action. I would have enjoyed a visit to a urinal. Gosh, that would have been a wonderful thing. Still, if I held on long enough the urine would simply be re-absorbed into my body. Problem solved.

  I wouldn’t have said no to a cup of tea.

  __________

  Things changed abruptly on the seventh day.

  At nine in the morning, Chadwell looked up from his desk and asked Miss Gladkins if she would be so kind as to take a tiny scraping of terracotta from an inobtrusive area of each statue, so that it could be sent for chemical analysis.

  About two hours later, she limped over to begin this task, leaning forward to scrape a morsel from Cornwall’s buttock area. Her face was just a few inches from his clay arse when, with one ill-timed moment of indiscipline, the entire mission went absolutely to buggery.

  Cornwall farted.

  It was a tiny, high-pitched tootle, unmistakably anal in origin. The noise simply could not have been anything else.

  Miss Gladkins stood bolt upright, as if she’d been goosed. Then she collected herself. She turned to look at us suspiciously as she limped back to her desk.

  A few minutes later she declared that she was going out for a walk to Oxford St at lunchtime, and should she pick Professor Chadwell up a bag of his mints from Selfridges, as she’d noticed he was running low. She picked up her heavy walking stick. Chadwell was staring at one of the books with a red spine and didn’t reply.