The Mortdecai Trilogy

by Bonfiglioli, Kyril

  ‘What you want should be in there,’ she said indifferently and went to perch delicately on the edge of the bidet. I riffled through the package reverently. One envelope contained insurance policies beyond the dreams of avarice, another a mass of wills and codicils, another held simply a list of names with coded references against each. (Knowing Krampf’s predilections, there was probably a fortune in that list alone, if one spent a little time on it, but I am not a brave man.) The next envelope was full of smaller envelopes, each one bearing a rare foreign stamp in the top right-hand corner: rich and devious readers will recognize the dodge – you simply stick an ordinary new postage stamp over the rarity and post it to yourself or your agent in some foreign capital. It is the easiest way of moving heavy spending money about the world without losing too much in commission.

  The last envelope was the one I wanted – needed – and it seemed to be in order. There was the magnum print with the faces cut out and a strip of 35-mm negatives on British film stock. A length of amateurish contact prints mostly showed the Backs at Cambridge but the centre frame showed the fronts all right: Hockbottle seemed to have been in charge that day and it had been Chummy’s turn in the barrel. His familiar grin, straight into the camera, showed that he didn’t mind a bit. I burned it without compunction and threw the ashes into the naughty bidet. It represented a lot of money but, as I just said, I am not a brave man – even money can come too dear.

  I was not troubled about the possible existence of other prints: Krampf may have been imprudent but he had not, I thought, been wholly potty and, in any case, prints are too easily faked these days; people want to see the negative – and the original negative at that, negatives prepared from a positive print are easily detectable.

  She twisted round and stared at the smear of ashes in the bidet.

  ‘Are you happy now, Charlie? Is that really all you wanted?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you. It makes me a little safer, I think. Not much, but a little. Thank you very much.’

  She rose and went to the safe, selected a couple of chunks of currency and closed the panel negligently.

  ‘Here is some journey money, please take it. You will perhaps need des fonds sérieux to help you get safely away.’

  They were two fat bricks of bank notes, still in their wrappers, one English, one American. The total amount had to be something quite indecent.

  ‘Oh, but I couldn’t possibly take this,’ I squeaked, ‘it’s a terrible lot of money.’

  ‘But I keep telling you, I have a terrible lot of money now – this in the safe is nothing, a cash reserve he kept for small bribes to Senators and for unexpected trips. You are please to take it; I shall not be happy unless I know that you have proper funds while you are avoiding these unpleasant men.’

  My further protestations were cut short by frightful shrieks from downstairs, superimposed on a bass of snarling roars. We raced for the stairhead and looked down into the hall on a scene of gladiatorial horror: Jock had a peon in each hand and was methodically beating them together like a pair of cymbals, while others, of both sexes, milled around him, tore at his hair, hung on his arms and were hurled off spinning across the tiled floor.

  ‘¡Bravo toro!’ cried Johanna piercingly and the mêlée became a tableau.

  ‘Put those people down, Jock,’ I said severely, ‘you don’t know where they’ve been.’

  ‘I was only trying to find out what they’d done with you, Mr Charlie – you said half an hour, didn’t you?’

  I apologized all round; the peons couldn’t understand my polished Castilian but they knew what it was all right; there was a good deal of bowing and scraping and forelock-tugging and polite murmurs of ‘de nada’ and they accepted a dollar apiece with every mark of pleasure. One went so far as to intimate courteously that, since his nose was squashed to a pulp, he merited a little extra honorarium but Johanna would not let me give him any more.

  ‘With one dollar he will get beautifully drunk,’ she explained, ‘but with two he would do something foolish, perhaps go off and get married.’

  She explained this to the peon, too, who followed her reasoning carefully and gravely concurred at the end. They are a logical lot.

  ‘A logical lot, Jock, don’t you think?’ I asked later.

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Lot of bloody Pakis if you ask me.’

  We got away before the sun was very high. I had breakfasted lightly on a little more tequila – it’s beastly but it sort of grows on you – and had contrived to avoid a farewell exhibition-bout with my doting Johanna. She was most convincingly tearful and distrait, saying that she would live only for my message that she might join me and live happily ever after.

  ‘Where we going, then, Mr Charlie?’

  ‘I’ll think about that as we go, Jock. In the meantime, there’s only this road. Let’s move.’

  But as we drove – as Jock drove, to be exact, for he had slept on the plane – I mused about Johanna. What earthly purpose could all that incredible codswallop of hers be serving? Did she really think that I was swallowing it? Did she think I could believe her bowled over by the faded allure of portly, past-it Mortdecai? ‘Garn’ was the word which kept springing to mind. And yet; and yet … Karl Popper urges us to be constantly on our guard against the fashionable disease of our time: the assumption that things cannot be taken at their face value, that an apparent syllogism must be the rationale of an irrational motive, that a human avowal must conceal some self-seeking baseness. (Freud assures us that Leonardo’s John the Baptist is a homosexual symbol, his upward-pointing index finger seeking to penetrate the fundament of the universe; art historians know that it is a centuries-old cliché of Christian iconography.)

  Perhaps, then, all was as it seemed, all to the gravy; indeed, as we soared up winding roads into the high country stretching its strong limbs in the young sunshine, it was hard to credit my fears and suspicions.

  Perhaps Krampf had indeed died of heart disease after excess at table: statistically he was a sitter for just that. Perhaps Johanna had indeed fallen violently in love with me: my friends have sometimes been kind enough to say that I have a certain appeal, perhaps an adroitness in these little matters. Perhaps the second powder-blue Buick and its driver were merely a relief shift ordered by Krampf: I had had no opportunity to put this to him. Perhaps, last of all, I would indeed send for Johanna and live the life of Riley with her and her millions until my glands gave out.

  The more I thought about this view of things the more sensible it became and the sweeter shone the sun on the unjust. I leaned back luxuriously into the rich-smelling leather of the Rolls – my Rolls! – and quietly whistled a happy stave or two.

  Martland, surely, would never believe that Krampf’s infarct was natural; he would assume that I had murdered him as per invoice and had been devilish clever about it.

  Only Johanna knew that I had burned the negative and if I dropped the merest hint to Martland that I might just have forgotten to do so he would never dare unleash his death dogs on me but would be forced to respect his word and protect me from all annoyances; such as, for instance, death.

  I liked it; I liked it all, it fitted together, it made nonsense of my fears, I felt positively young again. For two pins, I’d have turned back and given Johanna a little farewell token of my esteem after all, that’s how young I felt. The lark was on the wing and flying strongly, while the snail was positively striding up its favourite thorn.

  Admittedly, there was one fly trampling about in the ointment of my content: I was now the proud but shy owner of about half a million pounds’ worth of hot Goya – the hottest piece of property in the world. Despite what you read in the Sunday papers, America is not seething with mad millionaires panting to buy stolen masterpieces and gloat over them in their underground aviaries. As a matter of fact, the late Krampf had been the only one I knew of and I did not much want another like him. A superb spender, but hard on the nervous system.

  Destroying the painting was out of t
he question: my soul is all stained and shagged with sin like a cigarette smoker’s moustache but I am quite incapable of destroying works of art. Steal them, yes, cheerfully, it is a mark of respect and love, but destroy them, never. Why, even the Woosters had a code, as we are told on the highest authority.

  Probably the best thing was to take it back to England – it was, after all, as well hidden now as it ever could be – and get in touch with a specialist friend who knows how to do discreet deals with insurance companies.

  You know, all those dreary pink Renoirs which are incessantly getting pinched in the South of France are either sold back to the insurers at a straight 20 per cent of the sum insured – the companies won’t pay a franc more, it’s a matter of professional ethics – or they are pinched at the express request of the owners and immediately destroyed. The French arriviste, you see, lives in such a continual agony of snobbism that he dares not put his Renoir, bought three years ago, into a public auction and so admit that he is short of a little change – still less dare he take the risk that it might fetch less than he has told all his awful friends it is worth. He would rather die; or, in practical terms, he would rather assassinate the painting and collect the nouveaux francs. In England the police tend to purse their lips and wag their fingers at insurance co’s who buy back stolen things from the thieves: they feel that this is not a way to discourage villainy – in fact the whole process is strictly against the law.

  Nevertheless, if a certain young man, not unknown at Lloyd’s, murmurs in the proper ear that a bundle of currency posted to an accommodation address in Streatham will bring about a change of heart in certain thieves and cause them to panic and dump the swag in a left-luggage office – well, insurance co’s are only human you know (or didn’t you know?) and a thousand pounds is a great deal less than, say, five thousand ditto. The certain young man not unknown at Lloyd’s was also not unknown to me and although he didn’t like murmuring in that sort of ear more than once or twice a year he had, I knew, a heart of gold and owed me a trifling kindness. Moreover, he was terrified of Jock. Don’t think I’m recommending this particular caper, though: the police are professionals and we laymen are only gifted amateurs, at the best. If you must sin, find an obscure, unexplored branch of crime that the Yard hasn’t any experts in and work it gently, don’t milk it dry, and vary your modus operandi continually. They’ll get on to you in the end, of course, but if you’re not greedy you may have a few good years first.

  As I was saying, before the above gnomic utterances, I was by now wholly reconciled to a Panglossian view of things: all was explicable, the tangled web made, after all, a comprehensible pattern when looked at in sunlight and also, after all, one Mortdecai was worth a whole barrelful of Martlands, Bluchers, Krampfs and other dullards. (‘One of the most remarkable phenomena connected with the practice of mendacity is the vast number of deliberate lies we tell ourselves, whom, of all persons, we can least expect to deceive.’ J.S. Lefanu.)

  To complete my skimpy breakfast, and to celebrate the victory of virtue over dullness, I opened a bottle of the twelve-year-old Scotch and was just raising it to my lips when I saw the powder-blue Buick. It was coming out of an arroyo ahead of us, coming fast, engine howling in a low gear, coming straight for our nearside. Our offside was barely a yard from a sheer drop of hundreds of feet – it was a fair cop. I’d had my life. Jock – I’ve told you how fast he could be when necessary – wrenched the wheel over to the left, stood on the brakes, snatched first gear before the Rolls stalled and was turning right as the Buick hit us. The Buick man had known nothing of the strength of a vintage Rolls Royce, nor of Jock’s fighting brain; our radiator gutted his car’s side with a ghastly shriek of metal and the Buick span like a top, ending up poised on the shoulder of the road, its rear end impossibly extended over the precipice. The driver, face contorted with who knows what emotion, was fighting frantically with the door handle, his features a mask of nasty blood. Jock got out, ponderously strolled over to him and stared, looked up and down the road, went to the front of the mangled Buick, found a handhold and heaved enormously. The Buick tilted, started to go very slowly: Jock had time to get to the window again and give the driver a friendly grin before the nose went up and slid out of sight, slowly still. The driver showed us all his teeth in a silent scream before he went; we heard the Buick bounce three times, amazingly loudly, but never a thread of the driver’s scream – those Buicks must be better soundproofed than you’d think. I believe, but I am not sure even now, that it was friendly Mr Braun – who was once again proving to me the statistical improbability of death in an aircraft accident.

  I was surprised – and pardonably proud – to find that throughout the episode I had not lost my grip on the Scotch bottle: I had my drink and, since the circumstances were exceptional, offered the bottle to Jock.

  ‘That was a bit vindictive, Jock,’ I said reprovingly.

  ‘Lost my temper,’ he admitted. ‘Bloody road hog.’

  ‘He might easily have done us a mischief,’ I agreed. Then I told him about things, especially like powder-blue Buicks and the dreadful – is that word really so worn out? – the dreadful danger I was – we were – in, despite my recent brief and lovely courtship with the phantasms of success, safety and happy-ever-after. (It seemed hard to believe that I could have been dallying, so few minutes before, with so patently tinsel a mental mistress as safety.) My eloquence ran to such heights of bitter self-mockery that I heard myself, aghast, telling Jock to leave me, to get out from under before the great axe fell.

  ‘Bollocks,’ I’m happy to say, was his response to that suggestion. (But ‘happy to say’ is not true either: his loyalty served me but briefly and him but shabbily – you might say that his ‘bollocks’ were the death of him.)

  When the whisky had somewhat soothed our nerves we corked the bottle and got out of the car to examine its wounds. An Anglia driver would have done this first, of course, raging at fate, but we Rolls owners are made of sterner stuff. The radiator was scarred, weeping a little on to the baking road; a headlamp and sidelamp were quite ruined; the offside mudguard was heavily crumpled but still not quite so much that it would flay the tire. The show was, if necessary, on the road. I went back into the car and thought, while Jock fussed over the damage. I may have sipped a little at the whisky bottle and who shall blame me?

  No one passed along the road, in either direction. A grasshopper stridulated endlessly; I minded this at first but soon learned to live with it. Having thought, I checked my thinking both ways from the ace. The result came out the same again and again. I didn’t like it, but there you are, aren’t you?

  We sent the Rolls over the precipice. I am not ashamed to say that I wept a little to see all that beauty, that power and grace and history, being tossed into an arid canyon like a cigar end chucked down a lavatory pan. Even in death the car was elegant; it described great majestic curves as it rebounded in an almost leisurely way from boulder to boulder and came to rest, far below us, wedged upside-down in the throat of a deep crevasse, its lovely underparts bared to the sex of sunshine for a few seconds before a hundred tons of scree, dislodged by its passage, roared down and covered it.

  The death of the Buick driver had been nothing compared with this: human death in reality seems poor stuff to a devoted television watcher, but who amongst you, seasoned readers, has seen a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost die on its back? I was inexpressibly moved. Jock seemed to sense this in his rough way for he moved closer to me and uttered words of comfort.

  ‘It was insured full comprehensive, Mr Charlie,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Jock,’ I answered gruffly, ‘you read my thoughts, as usual. But what is more to the point, just now, is how easily could the Rolls be salvaged?’

  He brooded down into the shimmering, rock-strewn haze.

  ‘How are you getting down there?’ he began. ‘This side’s all avalanches and the other side’s a cliff. Very dodgy.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Then
you got to get it out of that crack, haven’t you?’

  ‘Right again.’

  ‘Dead dodgy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then you got to get it back up here, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Have to close this road a couple of days while the tackle’s working, I reckon.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘Mind you, if it was some stupid mountaineering twit stuck down there, or some old tart’s puppy dog, they’d have him up before you could cough, wouldn’t they, but this is only an old jam jar, isn’t it? You’d have to want it real bad – or want something in it real bad – before you’d go slummocking down there.’ He nudged me and winked enormously. He was never very good at winking, it contorted his face horribly. I nudged him back. We smirked.

  Then we trudged up the road, Jock carrying our one suitcase now holding essentials for both of us, which he was supposed to have salvaged with wonderful presence of mind as the Rolls teetered on the very brink of the precipice.

  ‘Whither Mortdecai?’ about summed up my thought on that baking, dusty road. It is hard to think constructively once the fine, white grit of New Mexico has crept up your trouser legs and joined the sweat of your crotch. All I could decide was that the stars in their courses were hotly anti-Mortdecai and that, noble sentiments aside, I was well rid of what was probably the most conspicuous motor car on the North American subcontinent.

  On the other hand, pedestrians are more conspicuous in New Mexico than most motor cars: a fact I realized when a car swept past us going in the direction we had come from; all its occupants goggled at us as though we were Teenage Things from Outer Space. It was an official car of some sort, a black and white Olds-mobile Super 88, and it did not stop – why should it? To be on foot in the United States is only immoral, not illegal. Unless you’re a bum, of course. It’s just like in England, really: you can wander abroad and lodge in the open air so long as you’ve a home to go to; it’s only an offence if you haven’t one – on the same principle that ensures you cannot borrow money from a bank unless you don’t need any.