‘Tee hee,’ I said. Then ‘Aren’t you having a drink?’
‘I never drink alcohol. I do not like to blunt my senses.’
‘Goodness,’ I babbled, ‘but how awful for you. Not drinking, I mean. I mean, imagine getting up in the morning knowing that you’re not going to feel any better all day.’
‘But I feel lovely all day, every day. Feel me.’ I spilled quite a lot of my drink.
‘No, really,’ she said, ‘feel.’
I gingerly prodded a golden, rounded forearm.
‘Not there, stupid: here!’ She flipped a button open and two of the most beautiful breasts in the world sprang out, quite bare, hard and richly nippled. In all civility I could not decline to grasp one, indeed, my hand made the decision for me. My castration complex had vanished like an evil dream. She pulled my head down to her.
Much as I enjoy kissing girls’ nipples, I must say I usually feel a bit sheepish about it, don’t you? I’m reminded of fat old men sucking juicily at their teat-like cigars. However, the extravagance of Johanna’s response to my first tentative grazing on her lovely pastures was such as to dispel all embarrassment from my mind, replacing it with fears for my own health. She reared up like a tortured cat and wrapped herself around me as though she were in the last extremities of drowning. Her slim, calloused fingers grasped me with delicious ferocity and I soon ascertained that her policy on underwear had not changed since she was seventeen.
‘Wait,’ I said urgently, ‘shouldn’t I take a shower first? I’m filthy.’
‘I know,’ she snarled, ‘I love it. You smell like a horse. You are a horse.’
Obediently, I broke into a canter, urged by her drumming heels. I was glad she had taken her spurs off.
Descriptions of middle-aged art dealers being ravished are neither instructive nor edifying, so I shall draw a row of ‘frissons’ like a shower curtain across the extraordinary scene which followed. Here they are:
I was shown to my room by the barefooted hussy in the drawstring blouse. She smiled at me blandly, pointing her lavish bosom like a pair of pistols.
‘I am at your service while you stay at the Rancho, señor,’ she said guilelessly. ‘My name is Josefina – that is, like Josephine.’
‘How apt,’ I murmured, ‘in the circumstances.’
She didn’t get it.
As the Countess had predicted, I was just in time for dinner. Changed and bathed, I sat down feeling more like the C. Mortdecai we know and love but I admit to having felt a little chary, a little coy, about meeting the old lady’s eye. As it happened, she avoided catching mine; she was a dedicated food eater, it was a pleasure to sit in front of her.
‘Tell me,’ I said to Johanna as the second course appeared, ‘where is your husband?’
‘He is in his bedroom. Next to the little dressing room where I, ah, received you.’
I stared at her in panic – no sensate human being could have slept through the zoo-like racket of our coupling. Seeing my consternation she laughed merrily.
‘Please do not worry about it. He did not hear a thing, he has been dead several hours.’
I don’t really remember what we had for dinner. I’m sure it was delicious but I seemed to have difficulty swallowing and I kept on dropping knives, forks and things. ‘Quaking’ is the only word for what I was doing. All I remember is the old Countess opposite me, cramming the groceries into her frail body like one who provisions a yacht for a long voyage. ‘Cur quis non prandeat hoc est?’ seemed to be her attitude.
We had reached the port and walnuts stage before I recovered enough aplomb to venture another question.
‘Oh yes,’ Johanna replied indifferently, ‘it will have been his heart, I suppose. The doctor lives thirty miles away and is drunk; he will come in the morning. Why do you eat so little? You should take more exercise. I will lend you a mare in the morning, a gallop will do you good.’
I became scarlet and silent.
The old lady rang a silver bell which stood by her place and a whey-faced priest stole in and said a long Latin grace to which both the women listened with bent heads. Then the Countess rose and made her way with fragile dignity to the door, where she let out a fart of such frightening power and timbre that I feared she had done herself a mischief. The priest sat down at the end of the table and began gobbling nuts and guzzling wine as though his life depended on it. Johanna sat smiling dreamily into space, presumably envisaging a blissfully Krampf-free future. I certainly hoped she was not envisaging any bliss which would involve my participation in the near future: all I wanted was some Scotch and a big fat sleeping pill.
It was not to be. Johanna took me by the hand and led me off to see the corpse, much as one might be taken to see the ornamental waterfowl in an English house. Krampf lay naked and nasty and very dead indeed, displaying all the signs of a massive coronary occlusion, as the thriller writers say. (There are no outward signs of death by massive coronary occlusion.) On the carpet beside his bed lay a little silver box which I remembered; it always held his heart pills. Krampf had gone to join Hockbottle: dicky tickers, both of them. To name but a few.
His death solved a few problems and created a few more. There was something about the situation which I could not, at that stage of the evening, quite define, but I knew that the word ‘trouble’ figured in it somewhere. Feeling sure that Johanna would not mind, I drew back the sheet which covered him: there was no mark of violence on his lardy body. She came and stood on the other side of the bed and we looked down at him dispassionately. I had lost a rich customer; she had lost a rich husband; there was little quantitative difference between our sorrows and the qualitative difference was that she, presumably, stood to gain a lot of money and I stood to lose some. Had Krampf been alive he would have felt like Jesus Christ between the two thieves, and indeed, death had lent him a certain spirituality, a certain waxy saintliness.
‘He was a dirty ape,’ she said at last. ‘Also base and greedy.’
‘I am all those things,’ I answered quietly, ‘yet I do not think I am like Krampf was.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He was mean in a shabby, tight-fisted way. I do not think you are mean like that, or at all. Why should rich men be mean?’
‘I think it is because they would like to stay rich.’
She thought about that and didn’t like it.
‘No,’ she said again. ‘His greed was not of that sort. It was other people’s lives he was greedy for: he collected his fellow men like postage stamps. He did not really want the stolen picture which you have in the cover of the Rolls Royce: it was you he was buying. You would never have got free from him after this deal. You would have been kissing his pimply behind for the rest of your life.’
This upset me very much. First, even Krampf could not have known – should not have known – just where the Goya was supposed to be hidden; second, here was yet another person apparently manipulating me instead of vice versa; third, this was a woman, for God’s sake, deep into the conspiracy and bubbling over with dangerous facts. Krampf had always been rash but he knew the basic rules of villainy. How on earth had he sunk to the point of telling things to a woman?
The whole complexion of Krampf’s death changed; before, it had been an extreme awkwardness, now it was a peril. With all this dangerous knowledge surging about so freely there were dozens of motives for killing him when previously there had only been one: Martland’s.
Moreover, I had decided only that morning not to carry out my part of the contract I had made with Martland for the terminating of Krampf. I have no patience with the absurd respect in which human life is held these days – indeed, our chief trouble is that there is far too much human life around – but as I grow older I find myself less and less keen on actually topping people myself. Particularly when they happen to be my best customers. Nevertheless, I should probably have kept faith with Martland as per contract had it not occurred to me that morning that I was already on the butcher’s bill myself and that on
ce I had killed Krampf I would be there redoubled, in spades, for a variety of reasons which you can surely work out for yourself.
‘When did he go mad, child?’ I asked gently.
‘In the womb, I think. Badly, when he started to make plots with a man called Gloag.’
I winced.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that figures.’
Despite appearances I was now certain that Krampf had been murdered: there were far too many motives. There are also far too many ways of simulating death by heart disease – and even more of inducing it in someone already prone to it.
I was piggy-in-the-middle and it felt horrid. Only Martland’s word as a prefect stood between me and the ultimate in whackings from that fell school sergeant Death. Martland’s word was as good as his bond, but his bond was mere Monopoly money. I pulled myself together.
‘Well, Johanna,’ I said brightly, ‘I must be off to bed.’
‘Yes,’ she said, taking me firmly by the hand, ‘we must.’
‘Look, my dear, I’m really awfully tired, you know. And I’m not a young man any more …’
‘Ah, but I have a way of curing both those things – come and see.’
I’m not really weak, you know, just bad and easily led. I shambled after her, my manhood cringing. The night was intolerably hot.
Her room greeted us with steamy heat like a buffet in the face – I panicked as she drew me in and bolted the door.
‘The windows are sealed,’ she explained, ‘the drapes are closed, the central heating turned up high. Look, I am sweating already!’
I looked. She was.
‘This is the best way of all to do it,’ she went on, peeling off my drenched shirt, ‘and you will find yourself young and vigorous, I promise you, it never fails, we shall be like animals in a tropical swamp.’
I tried a tentative bellow of lust but without much conviction. She was anointing me copiously from a bottle of baby oil, handing me the bottle, stepping out of the last of her clothes and offering the astonishing landscape of her steaming body to the oil. I oiled. From some undreamed-of reservoir my body summoned up a gravity tank of incalescent libido.
‘There, you see?’ she said, gaily, pointing at me, and led me to one of those terrifying water-filled plastic beds – eclipsing me with her deliquescent body, coaxing succulent sounds from the contiguity of our bellies, shaming forth a long dead, steel hard, adolescent Mortdecai demented with furtive lust: Mortdecai Minor, the likeliest candidate for wanker’s doom.
‘Tonight, because you are tired, I am no longer the mare. You are the lazy circus horse and I shall school you in the haute école. Lie back, you will like this very much, I promise.’
I liked it.
14
Ottima: Then, Venus’ body, had we come upon
My husband Luca Gaddi’s murdered corpse
Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close –
Would you have pored upon it? Why persist
In poring now upon it? …
Sebald: Off, off; take your hands off mine!
’Tis the hot evening – off! Oh, morning, is it?
Pippa Passes
Slowly, painfully, I ungummed my eyes. The room was still in utter blackness and smelled of goat. A clock had been chiming somewhere but what hour, of what day even, I knew not. I suppose you could say that I had slept fitfully but I cannot pretend that I awoke refreshed. More knackered, really. I squirmed out of the steaming bed and dragged myself wetly to where the window had to be. I was one hundred years old and knew that my prostate gland could never be the same again. What I panted for, as the hart for cooling springs, was fresh air – not a commodity I often pant for. I found the heavy drapes, drew them apart with an effort and reeled back aghast. Outside, a carnival was in full swing – I thought I had taken leave of my senses, despite prep school assurances that you go blind first.
The windows on this side of the house gave on to the desert and there, a couple of furlongs from the house, the darkness was splashed with crisscross rows of coloured lights, blazing for half a mile in each direction. As I gaped uncomprehendingly Johanna slithered up behind me and pasted her viscous form lovingly against my back.
‘They have lit up the airstrip, little stallion,’ she murmured soothingly between my shoulder blades, ‘a plane must be arriving. I wonder who?’ What she was really wondering, evidently, was whether spavined old Mortdecai had one more gallop left in his thoroughbred loins but the sheepish answer was plain to see. Her loving moo became a moue but she did not reproach me. She was a lady – I know it sounds silly – still is for all I know.
Effete or not, I have strong feelings about aircraft landing unexpectedly in the early hours of the morning at country houses where I am staying in equivocal circumstances. It is my invariable practice in such cases to greet the occupants of these machines fully dressed, showered and with a pistol or similar device in my waistband, lest they (the aviators) should prove to be inimical to my best interests.
Accordingly, I showered, dressed, tucked the Banker’s Special into its cosy nest and made for the great downstairs, where I found something astonishingly nasty to drink called tequila. It tasted of fine old vintage battery acid but I drank quite a lot of it, thirstily, before Johanna came down. She looked courteous, friendly but aloof; no hint of our late chumminess apparent on her lovely face.
A peon fluttered in and harangued her in the vile argot which passes for Spanish in those parts. She turned to me, well-bred surprise civilly concealed.
‘A Señor Strapp has arrived,’ she said wonderingly, ‘and says that he must see you at once. He says that you expect him …?’
I boggled a moment, about to deny all knowledge of any Strapps, before the penny dropped and the mental W.C. door flew open.
‘Ah, yes, of course,’ I cried, ‘that’s old Jock! Quite forgotten. Silly of me. My servant, sort of. Should have told you he was meeting me here. He’ll really be no trouble, just a heap of bedding and a bone to gnaw. Should have warned you. Sorry.’
Even as I babbled, Jock’s massy frame filled the doorway, his ill-hewn ashlar head weaving from side to side, eyes blinking at the light. I gave a glad cry and he returned a one-fang grin.
‘Jock!’ I cried, ‘I am so glad you could come.’ (Johanna, inexplicably, giggled.) ‘I trust you are well, Jock and, er, fit?’ He caught my drift and blinked affirmatively. ‘Go and get washed and fed, Jock, then meet me here, please, in half an hour. We are leaving.’
He shambled off, led by a she-peon, and Johanna rounded on me.
‘How can you be leaving? Do you not love me? What have I done? Are we not to be married?’ This was my day for gaping – I did it again. While I gaped she continued her amazing tirade.
‘Do you think I give myself like an animal to every man I meet? Did you not realize last night that you are my first and only passion, that I belong to you, that I am your woman?’
Huckleberry Finn’s words sprang to my mind: ‘The statements was interesting but tough,’ but this was no time for breezy quoting – she looked as though one wrong answer would send her galloping up to the boudoir for her Dragoon Colts. My jaws unlocked themselves and I began to drivel fast, as though drivelling for my life.
‘Never dreamed … didn’t dare hope … plaything of an idle hour … too old … too fat … burned out … bemused … haven’t had my tea … in terrible danger here … ’ That last bit seemed to interest her: I had to give a clumsily edited version of my grounds for fear; such as Martlands, Buicks, Bluchers and Brauns, to name but a few.
‘I see,’ she said at last. ‘Yes, in the circumstances perhaps you had better leave for the moment. When you are safe, get in touch with me and I will come to you and we shall be happy ever after. Take the Rolls Royce – and anything in it – it is my engagement present to you.’
‘Good God,’ I quavered, aghast, ‘you can’t give me that, I mean, worth a fortune, quite ridiculous.’
‘I already have a fortune,’ she
said, simply. ‘Also, I love you. Please not to insult me by refusing. Try to understand that I am yours and so, naturally, everything I have is yours too.’
‘Gaw Blimey,’ I thought. Clearly, I was being ridiculed in some complicated way – and for unguessed-at reasons – or was I? The glint in her eye was dangerous, genuinely.
‘Ah, well, in that case,’ I said, ‘there is one thing I really have to have for my own safety – it’s a sort of photographic negative, I fancy, and perhaps some prints of – well –’
‘Of two deviates playing at bulldozers? I know it. The faces have been cut out of the print but my husband says that one of them is the nasty Mr Gloag and the other the brother-in-law of your –’
‘Yes, yes,’ I broke in. ‘That’s it. The very thing. No use to you, you know. Your husband was only going to use it to get diplomatic bag facilities for stolen pictures and even that was too dangerous. Even for him. I mean, look at him.’
She looked at me curiously for a while then led the way to Krampf’s study, which was a riot of undigested wealth, a cinema usherette’s nightmare of Tsarskoe Selo. When I tell you that the central attraction – the Main Feature, so to speak – was an enormous, nude, hairy trollop by Henner which hung against Louis XIV boiseries and was lit by two of the most awful Tiffany lamps I have ever seen, then I think I have said all. Mrs Spon would have catted right there, on the Aubusson.
‘Merde,’ I said, awestruck.
She nodded gravely. ‘It is beautiful, is it not. I designed it for him when we were first married, when I still thought I loved him.’
She led the way through to Krampf’s private bog, where a fine Bouguereau – if you like Bouguereau – twinkled saucy titties and bums down into the still waters of a porcelain bidet which might have been designed for Catherine the Great in one of her more salty moods. The picture, cunningly, did not conceal a safe, but a carved panel just beside it did. Johanna had to diddle it in all sorts of complicated ways before it swung open to reveal groaning shelves of great coarse currency notes – I’ve never seen such a vulgar sight – as well as passbooks from the banks of all the world and a number of leather-covered suitcase handles. (I did not have to heft these to know that they were made of platinum, for I had given Krampf the notion myself. It’s a good wheeze, the customs haven’t got on to it yet. You’re welcome, I shan’t need it again.) She opened a drawer concealed in the side wall of the safe and tossed a parcel of envelopes to me.
The Mortdecai Trilogy Page 12