The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

by Kyril Bonfiglioli

  ‘Professor Weiss,’ I said, gently but crisply, ‘if you will be good enough to lift the domestic telephone which I see beside your right elbow and ask the Lodge to connect you with the Warden, he will assure you that I have not called to waste your time discussing the second-hand book market but to enlist your help in a matter of grave concern to the College. Or perhaps you will take my word for this? You will? Good. Then pray be so kind as to cast your eye over the manuscript passage which begins where I have inserted a large, readily-visible book-marker which I am sure you cannot have failed to notice. What I need is a quick construe. Graecum est, non legitur, you see.’

  He blinked, rose to his feet and unerringly found a bottle of San Patricio Fino and filled two rare and beautiful glasses. Then he put on some stronger spectacles and began to scan the ball-pointed interleaves.

  ‘τάδε γράφω περì τοῦ βίου µου φοβούµενος,’ he began lucidly. ‘ “I write this in fear of my life” is what is meant I imagine, but βίος is quite the wrong word, don’t you know, it means life as in biography; now ζώης would be all right, as in zoology. What comes next? άνιστορῶν γαρ ŏπου ούχ ἒχρην – “making enquiries where I should not” – ᾰγαν φανερòς γέγονα – “I have become too conspicuous” – well, yes, that’s clear enough but not very elegantly put – τῷ 77844 προσέχων τòν νοῦν – “while applying myself to 77844” – though I must say I don’t care for that asyndeton – ἒξ απροσδοκήτου µεµάθηκα – “I have unexpectedly learnt” – πῶς ἄρα ἐ φονεύθησαν οί ἐν 548923, καì άνθρωπον εὒρηκα περισωθέντα – “how the people at 548923 were massacred; and I have found a survivor.” ’

  He sucked in a mouthful of sherry, patted dry his wine-soaked moustache, drew a gurgle from his egregious pipe, cleared his throat and made, with some reluctance, as though to continue. One might have thought he was playing for time; it certainly gave me time to think: pennies dropped, bells rang and sirens screamed in my craven brainpan. I leapt to my feet and snatched the dangerous vol. from his hands as courteously as one can snatch vols from the hands of Professors of Greek Palaeography; nor did I stand upon the order of my going.

  ‘Thanks awfully,’ I gibbered, ‘sorry to waste your time, do forgive me, clearly someone earning a little pin-money writing trashy thrillers, wouldn’t you say? Eh? Delicious sherry, how kind, silly of me, shouldn’t have taken up your valuable wine – time, I mean – most kind …’

  He peered at me thoughtfully through spectacle-lenses as thick and obscure as boiled sweets. As I eyed the eyes behind them, which floated like dead goldfish in bowls, I remembered that I had forgotten that he had to be a great deal brainier than me.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it is you who are kind. I should very much have disliked to read any more of this “thriller,” as you are pleased to call it. Certain ah, extra-mural work I did during the War impressed on me vividly that one’s expectation of life is greatly increased by suppressing any curiosity about matters outside one’s own field. The heroine of your thriller seems to have learned this lesson too late, wouldn’t you say?’ I mumbled something as I edged towards the door.

  ‘Splendid. Splendid. Good afternoon, Mr er ah um …’

  I opened my mouth to say ‘Mortdecai’ but he was faster on the draw.

  ‘The Hon. Charlie Strafford van Cleef Mortdecai,’ he mumbled sleepily. ‘Came up in ’50, did you not; scraped through Prelims, spent your second year drinking and wenching, pulled yourself together in your third and managed a respectable Second Class Honours. I ran across one of your contemporaries the other day: Cadbury. He was clever.’ He pronounced the word as though he rarely used it. ‘Good afternoon again, Mr er ah um.’

  I tottered out into the bitter-lemon-coloured sunshine, feeling some three inches shorter. My feet were cold; the book in my hand was furnace-hot. It had taken a dotard to teach me just how hot. The Quadrangle was busy with men who might have been undergraduates, girls who might have been boys, people who might have been anything – who can tell nowadays? I ducked back into Professor Weiss’s staircase (no. XXXIX if you want to know), tucked the incandescent vol. under my waistcoat, counted to one hundred and sauntered forth again, my hands empty, my back stooped, my face contorted with scholarly thought, like a visiting American Professor giving his celebrated impersonation of a visiting American Professor. I was uncomfortably aware of the fact that my anguished nerve-endings were fiercely protruding from every pore and follicle.

  I sank into Bronwen’s armchair and coaxed them back inside by inhaling Scotch whisky like a distraught suction-pump. I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart, a tip I got from Childe Roland. It is a well-known medical fact that any Scotch, taken internally, will retract protruding nerve-endings, but only a few specialists are aware that very good Scotch, such as I was administering, is rich in all kinds of rare minerals, congeners and esters; it acts directly on the grey brain-cells, stirring the idle little blighters into frenzied activity. Ever so slowly I became aware of a prickling, formicating kind of sensation inside my skull as synapse after synapse thronged around and in a few minutes I opened the eyes, snapped the fingers and said, ‘Tom Cadbury! The very chap!’ I seized the house-telephone, buzzed the Lodge.

  ‘Fred,’ I said, ‘where is Mr Cadbury?’

  ‘Still at All Souls, far as I know, sir.’

  ‘Try and get him for me, please.’

  Ten minutes later I had trousered the Lexicon, along with a pair of Bronwen’s scissors, and was swooping, gowned, towards All Souls. En route, I stopped off at Queen’s where, anonymous in my gown, I cunningly purchased two packets of envelopes emblazoned with the Queen’s College coat of arms. These, too, I pocketed.

  I left Queen’s and swiftly made my way to the nearest newsagent to have a bash at one of those new-fangled “Xerox” machines. Photocopies carefully concealed in my innermost breast pocket, I set off to find my old mate, Tom Cadbury.

  In the appointed room at All Souls I found a pale-pink, portly, bald chap – amazing how some people age in twenty years or so, isn’t it?

  ‘Hullo, Charlie,’ he said cheerily, then: ‘Good God, what have you done to your face?’

  XIII

  Dealer’s choice: seven-card stud. Again.

  Alas! I tread an endless maze

  That seeketh to accord two contraries.

  ‘What cheer, young Thomas,’ I rejoined with equal cheeriness, then: ‘Good God, what have you done to your pate? Why the disaster area, the barren plain, the stricken field?’

  ‘Work and care, old top; care and work.’

  ‘Precisely what I apply to the upper lip – and with rather more pleasing effect. But more to the point, what are you doing here? I mean, last time I saw you, a mere twenty years ago, you had just penned a stiff letter to the Dean of All Souls, curtly refusing their offer of a Fellowship in no ambiguous terms. I posted the letter for you as I left, if memory does not fail me.’

  ‘Ah, yes, well, it was all rather strange, almost surreal. You see …’

  But it occurs to me that the ensuing dialogue will prove incomprehensible to any reader not steeped in All Souls lore, unless I weigh in with a brief prologue.

  All Souls, you must understand, is an odd College, even by Oxford standards of oddness. It was founded five centuries ago by one H. Chichele, who’d made a good thing out of being Archbishop, and it is a fine example of ‘all chiefs and no Injuns’: just a Warden, forty Fellows and four ‘Bible Clerks’ – all of whom had to be kinsmen of the said Archbp., which must have made its first lot of dons something of a mixed bag, for Chichele sprang from what is politely called ‘yeoman stock.’ Their only duty, originally, was to pray for the souls of those killed in Henry V’s French Wars and to be ‘bene nati, bene vestiti et modice docti’ – ‘well bred, well dressed and moderately well educated.’ Of course, All Souls has changed with the times a bit, nowadays likely contenders for
Fellowships have to be very well docti indeed and skilled in the art of eating cherry pie. Prospective F.’s are asked to dine, you see, and on such occasions the sixth or seventh course is always cherry pie. There is only one way of disposing of the cherry pits which is acceptable at All Souls and it’s a closely-guarded secret. Spitting them over your shoulder, for instance, is practical but not considered bene natus. Now read on.

  ‘You see …’ Thomas Cadbury was saying, ‘that letter of refusal you so officiously posted for me was really more of a displacement activity than an actual refusal because no-one had offered me any such Fellowship. I’d spent the previous evening with you, if you recall, and had naturally woken up with the sort of hangover which makes you want either to disembowel someone or to write a stiff letter. Since you had not yet appeared that a.m. I had to fall back on the stiff-letter ploy and I must say I felt the better for it until later, when I realised you’d actually posted the blasted thing. Judge of my amazement when, by return of post, I received a letter from the muddle-headed old codger who was Dean here in those days, infinitely regretting my refusal and asking me to show that there were no hard feelings and come and have a bite with him on the following Thursday week. I jolly nearly wrote back to say that I didn’t expect to be hungry on the following Thursday week but that would have been a falsehood, because in those days I was invariably peckish of a Thursday. So I turned up, as bene vestitus as a borrowed dinner-jacket could make me, and had a grand time, browsing and sluicing quite as freely as the phalanx of Fellows around me. Indeed, I recall telling a learned genealogist opposite me that the ninety-third in succession to the Throne was a chap called Browne-Windsor. Then something quite dreadful happened: a plate was slid in front of me groaning under a dashed great slab of pastry laden to the plimsoll-line with cherries!’

  ‘My dear chap,’ I said, aghast. ‘Tell me, what did you do with the stones?’

  ‘Well, the sight of the confection sobered me up more than a little, but not enough to make a snap judgement in a matter of that gravity so, pending a decision, I sort of tucked them in my cheeks until I must have looked like an unusually provident chipmunk. Then I felt a sneeze coming on and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, Charlie, I swallowed the bloody things.’

  ‘My word, Tom,’ I said admiringly, ‘I’d never have thought you had it in you!’

  ‘You’d have thought so if you’d passed me in the street on my way back; I must have been rattling like a Salvation Army collection-box. But come, I am neglecting you, dear old friend of my youth. Do you still take a little brandy at this time of the afternoon? I’m sure you do, you were ever a steadfast soul. There. Now, I’m sure you aren’t here just to feast your eyes on me – what’s the trouble? Where does it hurt?’

  Instead of answering, I dealt him a poker-faced hand of credentials. First the Warden’s letter, then the Duke’s and finally, when his eyebrows were already raised to where he had once kept his hairline, my warrant as Detective Inspector. I have never seen a man boggle so vehemently; I began to fear for his health.

  ‘Charlie,’ he said at length, ‘when last heard of you were an art-dealer; don’t attempt to deny it. Why, of a sudden, have you gone over to the right side of the law?’

  ‘Look, I honestly can’t tell you now – perhaps ever. In any case, if what I suspect is as nasty as I fear, you are far better knowing nothing about it. What I need is some unlikely but simple help from you, combined with as much lack of curiosity as you can muster. Are you on?’

  ‘Well, of course. Ask away.’

  ‘How many reasonably capable young Greek scholars could you lay hands on in, say, a couple of days? Six? Eight?’

  ‘Eight should present no difficulty.’

  ‘Now then, observe: I cut these Xerox copies of Greek manuscript into eight irregular, random-shaped pieces, numbering each and jotting down the position of each piece in this notebook. Now I number each of these larger envelopes and insert a piece in each, along with a smaller envelope, also numbered. I seal the larger envelopes. Now your task is to issue one envelope to each scholar in private, telling him some rubbish about a bet you have with someone at Queen’s. They are to construe their fragments, saying not a word to anyone. To confuse the issue, you might say that they should guess at the missing parts of any mangled words. They must return their fragments by College messenger, sealed in the smaller envelopes. I appreciate that this all seems a trifle daft but you have my word that it is both necessary and bloody serious. I’ll call back in, say, three days. OK, Tom?’

  ‘OK, Charlie,’ he said, shaking a glum and puzzled head. It is not everyone who is lucky enough to know a distinguished Grecian who can be relied upon utterly; I felt rich in his friendship. Walking back to College I also felt several stones lighter around the shoulders. Then, suddenly, I felt several tons heavier around the conscience, for I had, after all, left my staunch chum in possession of what might well be a danger to him if, for instance, any pairs of large men had been spying on my movements. I sped back to All Souls Lodge and demanded petulantly why Dr Rowse was not in his rooms when he knew I was coming, I’d written to him.

  ‘He’s in Cornwall, sir,’ said the porter. I stamped a petulant foot and minced away. Dirk Bogarde couldn’t have done it better.

  At Scone Lodge I found Fred struggling into his mackintosh with all the signs of a porter who is going off duty.

  ‘Evening, sir; that horse of yours won ’safternoon.’ Hell’s foundations seemed to quiver; the natural order of things was standing on its head and wiggling its toes.

  ‘Are you jesting with me, Fred?’ I asked severely.

  ‘No, sir. Eleven to two plus the place money, minus the betting-tax, let’s see …’

  ‘Don’t tell me, Fred, this has come too late in life for me to cope with at short notice. Put the winnings on some other chunk of pet food for me tomorrow – some creature which cannot conceivably win; I am too stricken in years to change my ways and start winning. But meanwhile’ – for I saw the disappointment on the honest fellow’s face – ‘meanwhile, pray let me buy you a great pot of ale at the White Horse and give you a sound thrashing at shove-ha’penny, what? Eh?’ He beamed, for he yields to none in the matter of ale-quaffing, while his prowess at shove-ha’penny is legendary.

  The White Horse in the Broad is the Mecca of ha’penny-shovers; I had quite forgotten how fast its Guinness-burnished shove-h. board is, so I had lost three games at one pint per game before I could recapture the smooth, oiled wristiness required. Fate was tittering in its sleeve, though, for just as I prepared to trounce Fred on the fourth game (for in my salad days I had been a formidable shover of such coins) he reminded me that it was a Guest Night at High Table and that I would have to get my skates on if I wished to be suitably dinner-jacketed in time.

  You would not wish to read what I could write about that dinner: when you have chewed one dead dog, you have chewed them all. It was a demoralised napkin that I trooped into the Common Room for dessert and, later, a demoralised moustache which quivered at the glass of port I had to expose it to. (There’s a great deal to be said in favour of a cup of hemlock, you know; at least you drink it in confidence that you won’t have to drink the same on the following night.)

  Dryden and I were propped dyspeptically against a sofa in the SCR when old Weiss came pottering up to us.

  ‘Ah, Tutor in Renaissance English Language and Literature,’ he said – for that is correct form in the better class of SCR.

  ‘Ah, Tutor in Greek Palaeography,’ rejoined Dryden more succinctly, ‘do you know Warden’s Fellow in Sociology? C. Mortdecai?’

  ‘Delighted, Mr er ah um,’ said Weiss, lending me a handful of fingers to shake (thus subtly suggesting that I couldn’t possibly be an Oxford man). ‘I daresay,’ he said vaguely, ‘that, with a name such as yours, you will be a keen reader of Civiltá Cattolica, will you not? The Jesuit newspaper, you know.’

  ‘I’m afraid not, really. Never mastered Vaticanese; it’s all Gree
k to me, ha ha.’ He let that pass, but those dead goldfish floated meaningfully behind the lenses.

  ‘A pity,’ he said. ‘Wonderful people, the Jesuits. So good at so many things: they can turn their hand to anything – tropical medicine, tergiversation, patristic theology, prevarication, there’s no end to their gifts. Someone said to me the other day that Civiltá Cattolica combined the profundity of Mr Hugh Hefner with the veracity of the Völkischer Beobachter; rather good that, eh? Eh? Daresay you’ve read their edition of Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to the Second World War? No? Oh, but you should; it’s quite a, ah, thriller, you might say. It was published in 1966, as I’m sure you know, and it’s fascinating on the subject of Polish diplomatic memoranda to Pius XII about the treatment of the Jews. Quite fascinating.’ And with that he drifted away, doubtless to enliven some other group. Dryden seemed mystified:

  ‘Weiss is not noted for his lucidity, nor for any great skill at small talk, but I have never heard him actually burble before. Whatever can he have meant?’

  ‘I don’t know, John,’ I said slowly, ‘but I rather think he meant something. In fact, he may have been suggesting that it was a pleasant evening for a solitary stroll. You will forgive me, won’t you? Perhaps I might call at your rooms for a nightcap later?’ I, too, drifted away – and out of the College, dumping my gown at the Lodge and borrowing a decayed waterproof to hide my resplendent dinner-jacket with its little red bouton of my Légion d’honneur (fifth class). Towards the Black Friars’ priory in St Giles is where I slunk – that street which could have been one of the loveliest in Europe if only … oh, never mind. The Black Friars kennelled behind the forbidding portals of their monkhouse are Dominicans, you understand: ‘Domini Canes’ – the Hounds of God. More to the point, they do not actually go out of their way to cuddle up to the Jesuits, their brothers in Christ. I don’t know why that is. What I do know is that if you happen to want a frank and open-hearted appraisal of some Jesuit publication you don’t pop over and ask the nearest Jesuit, do you? (Most priests are so bad at their jobs. Jesuits are far too good at theirs. I mean, you drop in on one and ask an innocent question about, say, Pausanias of Lydia and he simply tells you the answer, whereas what you were secretly hoping for was a brisk attack on your disbelief. If you are reduced to throwing yourself onto the carpet, kicking your legs and whimpering, he diffidently suggests that you might perhaps try going to church. Any church. He doesn’t say come back in a week, he doesn’t give you any little booklets or bondieuseries; it’s the soft sell. My art-dealing father did it beautifully, raising the customer’s hackles by suggesting that he was not quite ready for a Bernini bust or that the pair of Nollekens were perhaps a little too grand for the customer’s collection as it stood. Furriers are good at this, too; when a rich old lady asks the price of a mink the furrier smiles pityingly, as though to suggest that she is shopping above her income. She buys the fur.)