The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

by Kyril Bonfiglioli

  He said that no, he didn’t mind if I smoked. He went to a window and opened it; perhaps he thought that he’d scored. He moved well and lithely, I guessed that he had once been runner-up for the Junior Cashiers’ Welter-weight Cup. He was wearing stays and one of those moustaches that bank managers are born with. (Clean-shaven chaps who claim to be bank managers are always impostors, mark my words.)

  He also said that no, he could not give me a sight of the Fellworthy Statement of Account despite my impressive credentials; what the situation called for was Letters of Probate. He enjoyed saying that. Dukes, Wardens of Ancient Colleges and Detective Chief Inspectors, he seemed to imply, are but dust under Moloch’s chariot-wheels; to Rimmon they are chaff in the breeze. Letters of Probate are the only meat they crave.

  I hastened to say that yes, goodness gracious, I had scarcely thought he would lightly betray such a trust, after all, I wasn’t a bank inspector, was I, ha ha. (Did he flinch a millimetre?) Indeed, we could have had this chat, I supposed, at the Maison Française Garden Party next week, to which I happened to know the Warden had arranged for him to be invited (well, I knew I could fix that all right). His eyes gave off a glint, such as chinks in people’s armour give off. I struck while the chink was open, saying that if it came to that we could have discussed it after dinner at The Great House next month (that was truly a whopper: no self-respecting Duke has even heard of Clearing House Banks, he deals direct with Fort Knox). He melted almost visibly; the trained eye could detect gobbets of molten manager oozing out of the fatal chink. Still breathing on his base little soul as on a platinum flute, I protested that, why, only the other day I had been saying to Lord Rumble of Colne (his Chairman) that British banks were quite as silent as any grave in Zurich (may God forgive me) and that I wanted no more just then than routine confirmation of what the Bursar had told me about Bronwen’s academic grants, prizes and awards. The sources only – I had no interest in amounts. How the fibs tumbled out! And how intently he now listened!

  I lolled awhile, watching him muse furiously, weighing his professional integrity against not one but two social triumphs. In the meantime, our moustaches were exchanging invidious glances. Professional integrity lost the day, of course – doesn’t it always? – and he mumbled something into the acoustically shielded mumbling-box on his desk. In a trice or two he was handing me three telex print-outs with the smirk of a doctor showing you your Liver Function Test results, confident that you don’t know your AST from your bilirubin. He was right, of course, for I am something of a simpleton (indeed, when I was a youth my parents so despaired of my intellect as to contemplate buying me a seat in the Metal Market or, if even that proved too demanding, putting me into Holy Orders). On the other hand, I do seem to have picked up a few scraps of knowledge about the bits of paper that bankers swap around amongst themselves.

  One of the three bits of paper he handed me was a mere TTP (Telegraphic Transfer Payment) which stated, almost en clair, its message, which was to pay a sum into Bronwen’s coffers precisely equal to what the Bursar had told me her Fellowship was worth per term. The other two were Tested Cables and I put a baffled look on my face and a hand into my trouser-pocket. I’m not nearly so disorganised as my friends think: that very morning I had snipped out all the lining of the said pocket, leaving just enough to clip a small ball-point pen onto, and had shaved those areas of the Mortdecai quadriceps which were within reach of the said ball-point pen. The bank manager may well have thought that I was playing pocket-billiards but in fact I was scribbling rapidly onto the smoothened thigh.

  Prefixes were what I was scribbling.

  Perhaps at this point I should explain about Tested Cables. (If you are very rich you can skip this bit; in fact you can skip it even if you are but a common or high-street bank manager or an up-market thief.) A Tested Cable is a way of shunting chunks of money from a bank in one country to a ditto in another. Most of it is a jumble of figures, known as prefixes, indicating, to people who know about such things, the country, city and bank of origin, then the bank to which the lettuce is addressed, the account number of the recipient and, finally, the amount of lettuce to be shifted. Some years ago a goodish bit of thieving went on: you got into a bank-vault (at night, so that you didn’t have to hurt anyone except the aged night-watchman who had previously declared himself willing to be biffed a little for an honorarium of £500) and, just for the look of the thing, you nicked the contents. You burned the notes, didn’t you, because most of them had been ‘punched,’ or perhaps you gave a few to people you had a grudge against. What you really wanted was a sight of a certain slim volume which lived in the vault – I don’t think you’d want me to tell you the colour of the binding – so that you could take a few holiday-snaps of its pages with your Minox camera. You left the book behind, naturally. It contained the prefixes of all the serious banks in the world.

  You had, of course, already cultivated the acquaintance of a rich chap who had a bulging account in, let us say, the Reichsbank in Tel Aviv and you had elicited his account number, who knows how? Then, on the pretext of spending a dirty weekend in Paris, you spent a dirty weekend in Paris and opened a bank account for yourself there. Back in London, you dialled yourself into the kindly Post Office’s telex system and sent the Tel Aviv bank the appropriate jumble of numbers; nipped over to Paris and nonchalantly let them fill your attaché case with large, vulgar currency notes. Well, it’s a living, I suppose; the only dreary bits are all that air-travel and the sameness of Paris whores.

  By the bye, I really wouldn’t urge you to try this particular caper yourself: banks aren’t stupid, you know. They sussed this one out after a mere two years and a mere twenty million pounds or so; one or two of the victims, you see, had at last noticed that there were one or two noughts missing from the end of their statements of account. Nowadays, all Tested Cable Transfers go through a frowsty room in the HQ of the Clearing House Banks Association, where sits a proud, rat-faced man who is Told The Trick each day by word of mouth. He must never write it down, on pain of being banned for life from the moustache-wearing classes. ‘The Trick’ may simply be subtracting the day of the month from the prefix or adding in the number 69 or whatever. Most of you would hardly remember World War II, but secret agents morsing messages in those days always included a Deliberate Mistake, so that London would know that they were not transmitting a load of old moody at the behest of an Abwehr person who was courteously grinding the muzzle of his PPK into their earholes.

  If you’ll allow me to get back to where I was – in the office of Bronwen’s smirking bank manager – what I was doing was keeping the baffled look pinned onto my map while scribbling numbers onto the Mortdecai thigh. All three of the absurd bits of paper had two prefix-groups in common; one had to be the prefix of this branch, the other must be Bronwen’s account number. I recked not of these; the numbers I scribbled were the other groups on the two TCTs, groups which could only be the prefixes of the banks of origin. Finally, I gave the fellow an overacted ‘I give up’ look, thanked him courteously, flicked a pitying glance at his starveling moustache, left my cigarette just where it would leave a tiresome mark on his leatherette desk-top and made the sweeping kind of exit which only Mrs Spon and I know how to do properly. (The boy who makes my shirts has tried and tried but has never quite mastered it.) (The sweeping-out of a room, I mean.)

  Back in Bronwen’s set I stripped off all clothing from my southerly aspect and shifted my tum aside so that I could see the ball-point marks on the Mortdecai thigh. I copied the numbers onto a very small piece of paper indeed before scrubbing them off the thigh. Then I lifted the telephone and asked for an outside line, for I wished to dial the number of a venal bank manager I know in London. Then I remembered the snippets of wire I had found on Bronwen’s carpet and replaced the receiver. I thought a stroll would do me good. First I strolled to the joke shop on the corner and bought a brace of those little glass stink-bombs, then strolled further until I found a telephone kiosk which
had not recently been vandalised. Having got through to my London number, I browbeat my way through the usual succession of secretaries whose only function is to prevent people talking to people they want to talk to and, in about £1’s worth of time, I was helloing the London bank manager friend.

  ‘Ah, Dennis!’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ he said. ‘You again.’

  ‘No no no, quite wrong, this is not the Second Coming, merely C. Mortdecai. Look, Dennis, you remember that slim vol. in binding of a certain colour which you showed me that time we got sloshed at luncheon? Oh do stop groaning; just take a squint at it and let me have the meaning of a couple of groups of numbers, eh?’

  When bank cashiers grow up into bank managers there is a sort of rite de passage, part of which is having to take a kind of Hippocrytic Oath that they will never use expressions ending with the word ‘off’ to customers. I fancy I tried him sorely on this occasion. Choking back his spleen, he told me in a level voice that I knew perfectly well he could do no such thing.

  I said that I quite understood and that I’d enjoyed our chat and had he seen our mutual chum Oakesy of late. He understood: I swear I could hear the sound of a moustache being chewed. Our mutual chum Oakesy, you see, is a bank inspector by trade.

  Someone once said that if you whispered ‘all is known’ into the ear of, let us say, an American Cardinal, he would hastily pack a few pyxes and monstrances into a bag, don false whiskers and call at the nearest travel agency. Your actual bank manager is subject to similar, if lesser, qualms. Bank inspectors are rather like the Police Force’s ‘Rubber Heels,’ indeed they share the same motto: ‘Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes,’ which I have heard variously rendered as ‘We Cop the Coppers’ or ‘We Tell on the Tellers.’ They hunt in couples: the junior inspector receives a telephone call at 8 a.m., telling him to meet a senior ditto at, say, Ealing Broadway Underground station as soon as may be. They meet; they solemnly initial a sealed envelope and open it. Inside there is a slip of paper saying, perhaps, ‘Market Street, Eastbourne.’

  At HQ, meantime, the Despatcher of Inspectors is cackling hatefully as he cuddles his Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, for the train the inspectors will catch at Victoria has a restaurant car but it is too late for what British Rail jestingly calls “breakfast” and too early for a life-giving drink. Heh, heh! At Eastbourne, they stamp into the bank’s Market Street branch, flourishing many a dread credential and reciting an Ogden Nash-like poem which goes after this fashion:

  Keys,

  Please.

  Then they glance swiftly around to observe which cashier has gone green about the gills, which teller is slipping his pocket-money back into the petty-cash box and feeding the racing pages of the Daily Mirror into the shredding-machine, which assistant manager is sidling out in the general direction of Gatwick Airport. Although I have never, thank God, been engaged in the banking trade, my very stomach heaves in empathy with those venal varlets.

  If it comes to that, I shouldn’t much care to be an American Cardinal, either.

  What I am trying to get around to saying is that the very mention of our friend Oakesy’s name sorted out the thinking-processes of my friend Dennis almost instantly. He expressed an urge to ring me back in ten minutes but was my telephone secure? I made it so: the usual gaggle of ladies past the prime of life was glaring and gibbering into the booth; I dropped the two little stink-bombs, scrunched them underfoot and emerged, smiling sheepishly and examining the soles of my shoes, as one who fears he may have stepped in a pile of Sunday newspapers.

  My little ruse worked; when I returned to the booth or kiosk ten minutes later there were no other clients. When the instrument said ‘dring, dring’ I clapped a hankie to the nose, entered, and was tersely told that the prefixes I had cited were those of (a) the Fetter Lane branch of the Narodny Bank of Moscow and (b) a private sort of bank which concerned itself exclusively with the cash-flow of the F. Xavier Kleiglight University of South Wichita, Kansas, USA.

  ‘Spray that again, Dennis,’ I said, ‘I think some of it went down my shirt-front.’ He spelled the words out, then hung up without a friendly word.

  My feet found their own way back to Scone, for I was wrapt in thought until I was awakened by Fred the Head Porter saying ‘Horses, sir?’ I realised that I was standing in the gateway arch, muttering ‘Whitehall Moabites, Moscow banks, Bronwen Fellworthys, Kleiglight Universities’ while ticking these off on a finger apiece, hoping that this would help me to see what they had in common.

  ‘No, Fred,’ I replied absently, ‘not horses.’ Like a flash he whipped out a newspaper, saying:

  ‘In that case, Mr Mortdecai, I’ll let you in on—’

  ‘Stop it, Fred, I beg you. Here’s a couple of quid, back the wretched slug of your selection for me, but do not tell me its ill-omened name; your horses are always too polite for my taste.’

  ‘How d’you mean, sir?’

  ‘I mean they always courteously usher the rest of the field towards the post.’

  He was not hurt; you can’t hurt chaps like Fred.

  XI

  Dealer suspects readers*

  Farewell Love and all thy laws forever:

  Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more;

  Seneca and Plato call me from thy lore,

  To perfect wealth my with for to endeavour.

  I was half-way across the Front Quadrangle when I remembered, pirouetted through 180° and retraced my steps to the Lodge.

  ‘Fred,’ I said to Fred. ‘About those two men in the White Horse.’ He compressed his lips, shook his head.

  ‘Sorry, sir, never heard of them. Warden’s orders. Never saw no two men.’ I flashed the Warden’s letter of credence. He decompressed the lips.

  ‘Describe them, Fred.’

  ‘Big, heavy buggers. Almost twins. Looked like fuzz but not quite, like. Grey hats. Pale eyes.’

  ‘Fair hair? Ill-cut clothes? Like Russians?’

  ‘Never seen them with their hats off. Big, heavy coats, neat but not what you’d call fashionable. Talked a bit odd, p’r’aps, but you get all sorts here, as you know; bad as Balliol. Only Russian we got here is young Mr Ivanov and he speaks better English nor what I do. When he’s sober; he’s mostly pissed – we call him “I’ve enough,” har har.’

  ‘Har har, jolly good. What did they call each other, d’you remember? Not, for instance, “Basil” or “Tovarich” or “Piotr Alekseivitch” etc.?’

  ‘Well now, that’s funny, Mr Mortdecai, now I come to think on it I can’t recolleck they ever called each other nothing. Not as I can recolleck, no. Funny, that.’

  ‘But interesting, eh? Well, let me know if you remember anything else, even if it doesn’t seem important, eh?’

  I was half-way across the Quad again when I remembered again. This time I hailed a cruising undergraduate and asked him to point me towards the Junior Dean. He in turn hailed another, as follows:

  ‘Hoy, Angus, where does Little Noddy keep his pot?’

  ‘XIV.’

  ‘Staircase XIV,’ relayed the first. ‘That’s over there, the one after XIII but before XV.’ I thanked him courteously.

  ‘My pleasure, Uncle,’ he replied. That was another puzzle for me as I paced Junior Dean-wards; the youth cannot have seriously thought me his uncle, could he? I mean, my brother has neither chick nor child and I never had a sister of my own; although I’ve had a few other chaps’ sisters, now I come to think of it.

  Little Noddy proved to be a costive little booby with a bad case of blepharism and other tics: clearly addicted to the Solitary Vice. That was probably just as well, for he did not strike me as one to win the heart of a fair lady, to name but one sex. His breath vied with his feet as atmospheric pollutants. More to the point, he was a brimming beaker of non-information about the two men who had given him the receipt for whatever they had taken from Bronwen’s rooms. Ten minutes of eager spluttering boiled down to the fact that he was pretty certain that there were two of them, and of th
e male gender. He showed me the receipt, which read ‘Received of Scone College one case and contents.’ The signature, as Dryden had assured me, was quite illegible. The date showed the number of the month before the day, which might be construed as non-British. Which reminded me:

  ‘I believe you told the Warden, Junior Dean, that they seemed to have an American accent, or Swedish, or perhaps Australian?’

  ‘Oh well yes I think I was a bit of a ninny about that you see I’ve been thinking it over and now I think but I couldn’t be sure you understand that it was a Welsh accent perhaps though I’m not awfully good at voices but one of them said “Ve don’t usually give receipts …” ’

  ‘I see, that’s how Welsh chaps speak, is it?’

  ‘Well I don’t honestly know really I don’t think I know any Welsh people really do you I mean they left awf’lly quickly they seemed in such a hurry probably busy men I thought.’

  I, too, left awf’lly quickly. My nose, usually sedentary, was fast becoming an unruly member; it seemed to be pining to return to the comparatively new-mown-hay effect of the telephone kiosk. Soon I was safe in the Bronwenry, having closed its door and filled a great tumbler of Scotch and ginger ale. I gargled happily, deep in an armchair, my feet on Bronwen’s desk, admiring the effect of the sinking sun’s mellow rays on the rich bindings and polished shelves of her bookcases. Very slowly, as I admired, one of those cartoon bubbles sprouted from the top of my head, with the conventional electric light bulb glowing inside it. The aforesaid mellow rays, you see, were at such an angle as to make the dust on the said polished shelves glow: one could see just which books had been taken out since Turner, clearly no zealous wielder of the feather duster, had last dusted. Now, no-one would have taken out and replaced any books since the two men had rummaged the rooms and if they had taken any out they would have taken them all out, if you follow me. I hastily – while the sun’s position remained advantageous – plucked out the seven assorted vols which Bronwen had consulted, hoping that they might furnish some tip as to what had been occupying her mind in the few days before she underwent the Great Change.