The Mortdecai Trilogy

by Bonfiglioli, Kyril

  ‘Mr Krampf,’ I went on guardedly, ‘I seem to have a sort of companion on the road, if you know what I mean. A late model, powder-blue Buick convertible with New York plates. Do you have any idea …?’

  There was a long pause, then he chuckled fruitily.

  ‘That’s awright, son, that’s your kind of escort. Wouldn’t want anyone hijacking that old Rolls and Royce of mine.’

  I made relieved noises and he went on: ‘Hey, let’s don’t let him know we tumbled him, just make like he wasn’t there and when he gets here and tells me you never made him I’ll chew his nuts off, huh?’

  ‘All right, Mr Krampf,’ I said, ‘but don’t be too hard on him, will you. I mean, I was rather on the qui vive, you know.’

  He delivered another fruity chuckle – or perhaps it was a belch – and rang off. Then somebody else rang off. Perhaps it was just the hotel telephonist, but the noises weren’t quite right for that. Then I rang off and treated myself to a belch, too, and went to bed.

  Nothing else happened that night, except that I worried a lot. Krampf hadn’t made his millions by being a drunken old fart; to be a millionaire you need brains, ruthlessness and a certain little maggot in your brain. Krampf had all these and he was cleverer than me and much more evil. This was all wrong. My bowels whined and grumbled, they wanted to go home. Above all, they wanted no part in assassinating clever millionaires in their own homes. I finally nagged myself to sleep.

  11

  Yet now I wake in such decrepitude

  As I had slidden down and fallen afar,

  Past even the presence of my former self,

  Grasping the while for stay at facts which snap,

  Till I am found away from my own world,

  Feeling for foot-hold through a blank profound,

  Along with unborn people in strange lands …

  A Death in the Desert

  It was Sunday but you’d never have thought so by what was going on when I got to Little Rock, Arkansas. Some sort of protest was going on and, as usual, short-haired chaps in dark blue were boredly biffing longhaired chaps in pale blue jeans, who were calling them pigs and throwing stones and things. All very sad. As a Russian said a hundred years ago, these people believe that they are the doctors of society, whereas in fact they are only the disease. Traffic was at a standstill and, several cars ahead of me, I could see the blue Buick, bogged down in a sea of long hair and flourishing riot sticks.

  I killed the engine and mused. Why the devil would Krampf go to the expense and trouble of escorting across half a continent a motor car which no one in his senses would attempt to steal – and escorting it in so curiously oblique a way? Setting aside the strong possibility that he was barmy, I decided that he must have told someone about the extra piece of canvas which ought to be secreted about the car – that made him pretty barmy of course – and was now regretting it. Worse, he might be playing some deeper and more convoluted game, which would be consistent with his unscripted letter to the almost royal Chum. He could scarcely have guessed at the little murder job which Martland had entrusted to me but he might well have come to consider me, for other reasons, as sort of redundant and a threat to his security. ‘The heart is deceitful about all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?’ cries Jeremiah XVII:9 and as you know, Jeremiah XVII:9 was a chap with great insight into these matters, as well as being a little barmy himself.

  My little private store of worries and ass puckerings was much augmented by all this; I found myself pining for Jock’s strong right arm and brass-garnished bunch of fives. The plot was thickening in a marked manner; if I could not soon lay hold of a spoon with which to stir it, there was a distinct danger that it might stick to the bottom. My bottom, probably. And then where would the Hon. C. Mortdecai be? There was a dusty answer to that one.

  The traffic moved on after everyone concerned had been thoroughly biffed and bashed and screamed at and I didn’t spot the Buick again until just after the Shawnee crossing of the North Canadian River, where I glimpsed it lurking down a side road. I stopped at the next petrol station (they call it gas there, I wonder why?) hoping to give the driver a good eyeballing as he passed.

  What I saw made me gape and gibber like a housewife choosing Daz on the television; two or three seconds later I was twenty miles down the road, sitting on a motel bed and sucking in whisky until I could think straight. It was the same car – at least it bore the same number plates – but overnight it had lost a deep dent in a fender and acquired a suit of whitewall tires and another radio antenna. The driver had lost a few stones and become a thin, dyspeptic cove with a mouth like the slot in a piggy-bank. In short, it was not the same car at all. The implications were unclear but one thing stood out like Priapus: there was no way in which this could be a change for the better. Someone was devoting a good deal of time and trouble and expense to the affairs of C. Mortdecai and it certainly wasn’t the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Aid Society. A stupid man might not have been too frightened but I was not stupid enough for that. A really bright chap, on the other hand, would have dumped everything and run for home with all speed, but I was not really bright, either.

  What I did was leave the motel, telling them that I would be back after dinner (I’d already paid, naturally) and drive circuitously to the heart of Oklahoma City, arriving tired and grim.

  Not too near the centre I found a solid, sober sort of hotel which looked as though it would not knowingly harbour the more obvious kind of barbouze or assassin. I drove into the underground garage and waited until the night attendant had exhausted his stock of admiring ‘shee-its’, then I told him that the Rolls was entered in an RR Concours d’Elégance in Los Angeles the following week and that a hated rival would stop at nothing to impede my progress or the car’s chances of success.

  ‘What would you do,’ I asked him hypothetically ‘if a stranger offered you money to let him sit in the car for five minutes while you went away and sat in your office?’

  ‘Well, Sir,’ he said, ‘I guess I’d jest wave this little old wrench at him and tell him to haul his ass out of here, then I’d ring the desk upstairs and then in the morning I’d kind of tell you how much money he’d offered me, see what I mean, Sir.’

  ‘I do indeed. You are clearly a capital fellow. Even if nothing happens I shall assume, in the morning, that you refused let us say five, ah, bucks, what?’

  ‘Thank you, Sir.’

  I went up in the lift or elevator and started work on the desk clerk. He was a well-scrubbed, snotty little chap in one of those suits only desk clerks can buy – or would want – and his breath smelled of something unwholesome and probably illegal. He studied my luggage like a pawnbroker before he peevishly admitted that he did have a vacant room with bath, but he thawed fast when he saw my diplomatic passport and the five-dollar bill I had carelessly left inside it. He was just sliding the money towards him when I trapped it with a well-shaped forefinger. I leaned over the counter and lowered my voice.

  ‘No one but you and I knows that I am here tonight. Do you follow me?’

  He nodded, both our fingers still on the money.

  ‘Consequently, anyone telephoning me will be trying to locate me. Are you still following?’

  He still was.

  ‘Now, none of my friends could possibly be trying to get in touch with me here and my enemies are members of a political party which is dedicated to the overthrow of the United States. So what will you do if somebody calls me?’

  ‘Call the cops?’

  I winced with unfeigned chagrin.

  ‘No no NO,’ I said. ‘By no means the cops. Why do you think I’m in Oklahoma City?’

  That really fetched him. Awe stole into his juicy eyes and his lips parted with a tiny plop.

  ‘You mean, just call you? Sir?’ he said at last.

  ‘Right,’ I said, and released the five dollars. He stared at me until I was inside the lift. I felt reasonably secure – desk clerks all over the world have two t
alents: selling information and knowing when not to sell information. These simple skills spell survival to them.

  My room was large, well-proportioned and pleasant but the air conditioning made tiresome noises at random intervals. I asked room service for a selection of their best sandwiches, a bottle of branch water, a good drinking glass and the house detective. They all arrived together. I took pains to befriend the detective, who was an awkward, seven-foot youth with a shoulder holster which creaked noisily when he sat down. I gave him Scotch whisky and a load of old moody similar to that which the desk clerk had gobbled. He was a serious boy and asked for my credentials; they impressed him considerably and he promised to keep a special eye on my floor that night.

  When he had gone, five dollars later, I inspected my sandwiches with moody pleasure; there was great store of them, on two sorts of bread and filled with all manner of good things: I did my best with them, drank some more Scotch and got into bed, feeling that I had secured myself as best I could.

  I shut my eyes and the air conditioner rushed into my head, carrying with it all manner of dread and speculation, a thousand horrid fancies and a mounting panic. I dared not take a sleeping pill. After an interminable half hour I gave up the fight for sleep and put the light on. There was only one thing for it – I lifted the telephone and put in a call to Mrs Spon in London. London, England, that is.

  She came through in a mere twenty minutes, shrieking and honking with rage at being awakened and swearing by strange gods. I could hear her vile little poodle Pisse-Partout in the background, adding his soprano yelps to the din; it made me quite homesick.

  I soothed her with a few well chosen words and she soon got it into her head that this was a matter of some seriousness. I told her that, at all costs, Jock must be at the Rancho de los Siete Dolores by Tuesday and that she must see to it. She promised. The problem of getting an American visa in a few hours is nothing to a woman like her: she once got a private audience of the Pope just by knocking on the door and saying she was expected; they say he very nearly gave her a contract to redo the Sistine Chapel.

  Knowing that Jock would be there to meet me eased my worst fears; it only remained now to get there without leaving any bloodstains in my spoor.

  I sank into an uneasy slumber interspersed, curiously, with erotic dreams.

  12

  There was no tea to be had in the morning but I was on the very threshold of the old West and knew that I had to learn to rough it. ‘Pioneers! Oh, Pioneers!’ as Walt Whitman never tired of exclaiming.

  Neither the desk nor the garage had anything to report, so I toddled out to take the air and see if the neighbourhood was blue-Buick-infested. What I found was a sort of bar advertising in its window something called the Old Oklahoma Cattleman’s Breakfast Special. Who could resist it? Not I.

  The O.O.C.B.S. proved to be a thick steak, almost raw, a hunk of salt bacon the size and shape of my fist, a pile of hot sourdough biscuits, a tin pot of ferocious coffee and half a gill of rye whisky. Now I am a man of iron, as you will by now have realized, but I confess I belched. I was trapped, for the barman and the short-order cook were both leaning on the bar, watching my future career with considerable interest as it were, their faces grave and courteous but sort of expectant. Britain’s honour lay in pawn to my knife and fork. I weakened some of the coffee with some of the whisky and drank it, suppressing a gagging shudder. I found strength after this to try a hot biscuit, then some more coffee, then a corner of the bacon and so on. Appetite grew on what it fed upon and soon, to the amazement of myself and all beholders, the very steak itself fell to my bow and spear. ’Tis from scenes like this that Britain’s greatness springs. I accepted a free drink from the barman, shook hands gravely and made a good exit. Not all Ambassadors sit in Embassies, you know.

  Much fortified, I collected the Rolls and turned my face toward the Golden West, the Lyonesse of our times, the nursery of the great American fairy tale. At noon I crossed the State line into the panhandle of Texas, a solemn moment for any man who rode with the Lone Ranger each Saturday morning as a child.

  Mindful of the Buick-mounted rustler on my trail, I started to buy a few gallons of petrol at almost every petrol station, taking care to inquire at each one for the road to Amarillo – which lay due West on that very road. Sure enough, the blue car swept by me somewhere between the townships of McLean and Groom, the driver looking neither to right nor left. Clearly, he was satisfied of my destination and intended to front-tail me to Amarillo. I let him have a few reassuring glimpses of me in his driving mirror, lying a mile behind him, then chose a useful left hand turning and sped south to Claude then southeast through Clarendon to the Prairie Dog Town fork of the Red River – there’s a place name to stir the blood – which I crossed at Estelline. I felt no need of luncheon but kept up my strength with a little rye whisky here and there and an occasional egg to give it something to bite on. Following the least probable roads I worked my way West again and by mid-afternoon I was satisfied that I must have lost the Buick for good. Needless to say I had lost myself too, but that was of secondary importance. I found a sleepy motel staffed by one thirteen-year-old boy who hired me a cabin without raising his eyes from his comic book.

  ‘Hail Columbia! Happy land!’ I told him, borrowing freely from R.H. Horne, ‘Hail, ye heroes! Heaven-born band!’

  He almost looked up, but decided in favour of The Teenage Werewolf From Ten Thousand Fathoms – I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame him.

  I zizzed away the worst of the afternoon, awakening some three hours later with a mighty thirst. When I had seen to that I strolled outside to stretch my legs and scare up some ham and eggs. A furlong down the dusty road, under the shade of a valley cottonwood, stood a powder-blue Buick.

  That settled it: the Rolls was bugged. No human agency could have tracked me through that mazey day unaided. Quite calm, I ate the bacon and shirred eggs along with great manly cups of coffee, then sauntered back to the Rolls with the air of a man quite unencumbered with powder-blue Buicks. It took me almost ten minutes to find the tiny transistorized tracer beacon: it was magnetized fiercely to the underside of my right hand front mudguard.

  I started the Ghost and drifted away in the wrong direction; after a few miles I hailed, frantically, a State Trooper mounted on an unbelievable motor bike and proclaimed myself lost.

  When a native son is unwise enough to ask the way of an American policeman he is either jailed for vagrancy or, if the policeman is a kindly one, told to buy a map. This one, I swear, would have struck me for flagging him down had I not been wearing an English accent and a Rolls Royce of great beauty, but these beguiled him into a pro hac vice civility. I got out of the car and, as he pointed things out to me on the map, leaned lightly against his great Harley Davidson machine, letting the grumble of the idling engine drown the smart click of the mini-transmitter’s magnet as it clamped itself under his rear mudguard. He roared away northwards at a dashing pace; I lurked down a dirt road until the Buick dawdled by in confident pursuit, then off I went like the clappers, south and west.

  A vast, theatrical moon rose over Texas and I drove on spellbound for hours through forests of Spanish Bayonet and fields of amaranthine sagebrush. At last, on the edge of the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains themselves, I edged the Rolls into a friendly canyon and settled down to sleep behind the wheel, a bottle of whisky within easy reach in case of mountain lions.

  Prompt on cue, a coyote curdled the thin distances of the night air with his whooping love song and, as I drifted into sleep, I thought I heard the muted thunder of far away, unshod hooves.

  13

  I met him thus:

  I crossed a ridge of short broken hills

  Like an old lion’s cheek-teeth …

  An Epistle

  I was awakened by a shot.

  Not thrilled? Then I venture to guess that you have never been awakened in that way yourself. For my part I found myself down among the accelerator and brake pedals
before I was properly awake, whimpering with terror and groping frantically for the Banker’s Special pistol in its hidey-hole under the seat.

  Nothing happened.

  I thumbed back the hammer and peeped, wincing, over the edge of the window.

  Nothing went on happening.

  I looked through the other windows – nothing – and decided that I had dreamed the shot, for my sleep had been illustrated with the dread exploits of Comancheros, Apaches, Quantrill’s guerrillas and other fiends in human shape. I treated myself to another O.O.C.B.S. breakfast, only this time without the steak, ham, hot biscuits or coffee. There were one or two bad moments but I was not sick and the old rapture was soon recaptured and I felt emboldened to step out for un petit promenade hygiénique. As I opened the car door another shot rang out, followed one fifth of a second later by the bang of the car door closing again. There is still nothing wrong with the Mortdecai reaction time.

  I listened carefully to my audile memory, recalling the exact noise of the shot.

  1. It had not been the unmistakable, explicit BANG of a shotgun

  2. Not the vicious CRACK of a small calibre rifle

  3. Not the BOOM of a .45 pistol

  4. Not the ear-stinging WHAM of a heavy calibre standard rifle, or a magnum pistol fired in your direction

  5. Not the terrifying whip-crack WHANG-UP of a high velocity sporting rifle fired towards you, but something of the same nature

  6. A sporting rifle, then, but

  7. Not fired in the canyon because no echoes and surely

  8. Not fired at me – dammit, a Girl Guide couldn’t miss a Rolls Royce with two slowly aimed shots.

  My intellect was satisfied that it was some honest rancher smartening up the local coyotes: my body took longer to pacify. I crept back on to the seat and twitched gently for fifteen minutes, nibbling at the rye from time to time. After about a hundred years I heard an old car start up miles away across the desert and chug even further away. I sneered at my craven self.