Then I went to the lav and changed my clothes and gave the hireling garments to Blucher to return to the honest artisan in Kendal – I enjoyed making him do that. Soon afterwards we parted in a spaghetti-like tangle of insincere matiness – except for the Vicar, who was doing his Christian best to believe that we were all nice chaps – and went our separate ways.
My separate way was to be driven two-hundred-odd miles to London in what Johanna called ‘a cute little British auto’ – a Jensen Interceptor. She had no patience with the absurd British affectation of using the left-hand side of the road; I probably secreted more adrenalin in those four hours than Niki Lauda uses in a whole Grand Prix season.
White and quaking, I was decanted at Brown’s Hotel, London, W1, where Johanna firmly sent me to bed for a nap with a huge pottle of brandy and soda. It was, of course, good brandy this time. Sleep, Nature’s kindly nurse, ravelled up the sleeve of care until dinner-time, when I arose with my nerve-endings more or less adequately darned. We dined in the hotel, which spares me the trouble of saying how good the dinner was. The waiter, who to my certain knowledge has been there since 1938, murmured into my ear that he could recommend the mustard: a statement that has never failed to charm me. Indeed, those were the very words, spoken by that very waiter, which first opened my youthful eyes on the enchanted landscape of gastronomy, long, long ago. (Few men almost no women understand about mustard, you must have noticed that. They think that mustard-powder and water mixed five minutes before dinner makes a condiment; you and I know that this is merely a poultice for sore feet.)
Then we went to the River Room or the Saddle Room or whichever night-club it was that year; my heart was not really in it. I moodily ordered a plate of radishes to throw at passing dancers of my acquaintance but my aim was poor and I desisted after a professional wrestler offered to tear my leg off and beat me with the wet end. Johanna was in tearing high spirits and laughed merrily; she almost charmed away my sense of doom and inadequacy.
Back at the hotel, she showed no signs of fatigue; what she did show me was a nightdress which could have gone through the mail as a postcard if there had been enough space on it to accommodate a postage-stamp.
Only a few of the oysters seemed to be pulling their weight but I was pretty good the first time.
My mental clock is amazingly good: at 10.31 I opened a petulant eye and croaked a complaint to Jock. Where, where, was the life-giving cup of tea, the balm which, at 10.30 precisely, brings the Mortdecais of this world back to some kind of membership of the human race? ‘Jock!’ I croaked again, desperately. A throaty, girlish voice beside me murmured that Jock wasn’t around. I swivelled a bloodshot eyeball and focused it on my bride. She was wearing that absurd nightdress again – it seemed to have lost its shoulder-straps. She was sitting up, toying with The Times crossword; the garment in question only afforded modesty because her nipples were supporting it like a pair of chapel hat-pegs. I shut my eyes firmly.
‘Charlie darling?’
‘Grmblumblegroink,’ I said, unconvincingly.
‘Charlie dearest, can you think of a word of seven letters beginning with “m” and ending with a double “e” and meaning “an extra performance in the afternoon”?’
‘Matinée,’ I mumbled.
‘But doesn’t “matin” mean morning, Charlie?’
‘Yes, well, the original meaning of matinée was “a way of amusing oneself in the morning”,’ I said learnedly. A moment later I could have bitten off my tongue.
Luckily, one intelligent, public-spirited oyster had been holding itself in reserve against just such a contingency.
It really is quite astonishing how sex affects the sexes. I mean, it usually leaves the chap tottering about and feeling like a disposable dish-rag in search of an incinerator, whereas the female half of the sketch tends to skip about uttering glad cries and exhibiting only those delightful smudges under the eyes which head-waiters would notice. Another by-product of the primal act in women is that they exhibit a frenetic desire to go shopping.
‘Charlie, dear,’ said Johanna, ‘I think I shall go shopping. I hear you have a cute little street right here in London called Bond Street, right? Kind of a poor man’s Rue de Rivoli?’
‘More of a rich man’s Marché des Puces,’ I said, ‘but you have the general idea. Almost any taxi-driver will know the way there; it’s almost a furlong. Don’t overtip. Have fun. I’ll go to my bank, I think.’
That was where I went, on foot, for the good of my health. This journey involved passing through the more Chinese parts of Soho – for reasons which I shall presently make clear – and I chanced to glance through the window of a particularly well-set-up-looking restaurant. To my amazement, there sat Johanna, deep in conversation with a portly person who looked like an owner of such a place. She did not see me.
Now, you do not have to be a natural worrier to worry a little at the sight of your bride deep in conversation with Soho restaurant-owners when she has assured you that she is shopping in Bond Street, nor do you have to be a jealous or suspicious man to feel a stirring of curiosity as to what such a bride could possibly have to discuss with such a restaurant-owner. I mean, I had papers to prove that Johanna was my ever-loving wife; I had her word for it that she was in Bond Street, snapping up bargains in wild mink and such, and the restaurant-owner’s best friend would have felt bound to admit that he, the restaurant-manager, was as Chinese as a restaurant-owner can be, even in Soho.
Pray do not for a moment think that I dislike Chinese chaps; some of my best friends are those who make life beautiful with spare-ribs cooked in oyster sauce, not to mention pieces of duck swaddled in pancakes. No, what disturbed me was a certain wrongness about this situation, a wrongness which imparted an all-too-familiar twitching pang in the soles of my feet. Johanna, you see, was not a liar in the way that ordinary wives are liars. Although my acquaintance with her so far had been brief and torrid, I had formed the opinion that she was too rich, too self-confident, too clever to resort to lying in day-to-day matters.
Why, then, was she not in Bond Street, as advertised, scribbling her signature on Travellers’ Cheques and scooping up emerald parures and things?
What I did was what I always do when in doubt: I telephoned Jock.
‘Jock,’ I said, for this was his name, you see, ‘Jock, are you still friends with that rough, ugly, deaf-and-dumb night watchman at those publishers in Soho Square?’
‘Yeah,’ he said succinctly.
‘Then straddle your great motor-bike, Jock, scoop up this sturdy, deaf-and-dumb friend and drop him in Gerrard Street. He is to enter a restaurant called the No Tin Fuk and order a simple, nourishing repast. Give him some money for this because I am sure those publishers he works for keep him short of the readies. When in the restaurant he is to watch, guardedly, a beautiful blonde lady called Mrs M. – yes, the one I married the other day – and to use his skill at lip-reading. She will be talking to a portly Chinese gentleman; I long to know what she is saying.’
‘Right, Mr Charlie.’
‘Make all haste, Jock, please.’
‘That’s us you hear coming round the corner,’ he said.
I replaced the receiver in a courteous position then trotted puzzledly off to my bank. This was not my real bank, where I keep my overdraft, it’s what I call my Savings Bank. It isn’t even a Savings Bank in any ordinary sense of the word: it is the long-established premises of the most learned print-seller in London, an ancient person who does not approve of me for reasons which I do not understand. Why I call him my Savings Bank is as follows: I have a large and lavishly-produced book called The Complete Etchings of Rembrandt van Rijn. Every etching R. van R. ever etched is reproduced in its exact size and so exquisitely that it is hard to believe that they are not the originals. Moreover, these illustrations are ‘tipped in’, which means that they are printed separately and just lightly gummed to the pages by one edge. Whenever I have a few pennies to spare in my pocket, pennies which I might
not want to confuse the nice tax-man with, I trundle round to the said print-dealer and buy a Rembrandt etching from him. A real one, of course, for he sells no others. This purchase takes some little while because he is an honest man, you see, and honest men can afford to stick out for the real price. Unlike some I could name.
When I have bought such an etching I toddle home, rip out the appropriate illustration in the Complete Etchings, and lovingly replace it with the real one I have just bought. Your common burglar would not dream of nicking such a book but, as it stands today, it’s worth about a quarter of a million in any large city in the world. Decent chaps like me scarcely ever have to flee for our lives but, if we must, it’s nice to have our savings with us unobtrusively. Your common Customs Officer, bless him, is unlikely to spare a glance for a fat, dull art-book with little or no pornographic content, carried by a fat, dull art-dealer.
The ancient dealer, on this occasion, grudgingly admitted that he had a pretty fine second-state impression of ‘The Three Trees’ with thread margins, and gave me the sort of look which art-dealers give you when they are pretty sure that you cannot afford the work of art in question. I, however, was embarrassingly flush with money from my American caper and said disdainfully that what I really had in mind was an impression of the first state of that etching, on vellum. He reminded me that there was only one such example, which happens to be in Samuel Pepys’s scrapbook in the Library of a place called Magdalene College, which is in a town called Cambridge, famed for its unsound scholarship and web-footed peasantry. Forty minutes later he handed over the etching and gave me a glass of better sherry than you would think, while I parted with a sheaf of great, vulgar currency-notes. Over his largest print-cabinet he has a mahogany tablet inscribed with the words of one of my favourite authors, Psalms xx, 14: ‘It is naught, it is naught, sayeth the buyer: but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth.’ As I lurched out, grumbling, he directed my attention to this.
‘There’s an even better writer,’ I snarled, ‘called Psalms xxviii, 20, and he says He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent!’ I thought I had him there but he blandly asked me which of us I was referring to. You can’t win, you see, you can’t win. Ordinary art-dealers are human beings in their spare time but honest print-sellers are a race apart.
Here is what us scholars call an excursus. If you are an honest man the following page or two can be of no possible interest to you. You are an honest man? You are sure of that? Very well, turn to page 214, because this part is only about how people deploy sums of money which used to belong to other people.
Taking large slabs of money away from other people is, I am told, a simple action for anyone who is strong and brave and doesn’t lose any sleep after hitting people on the head or breaking the law in other ways. Getting it into the fiscal system again in one’s own favour is a different matter altogether. Take a few examples, starting from the bottom.
(A) Your simple villain whose only task in the caper was nicking a get-away car just before the event and wiping the fingerprints or ‘dabs’ off it afterwards. He gets perhaps £500 in used one-pound notes and, regardless of his superiors’ warnings, splashes them about in his local pub, buying drinks for one and all. The boys in blue pick him up within 72 hours and kindly ask him to tell them the names of his superiors. He does not tell them, not out of honour-amongst-thieves but because his superiors have been too smart to let him know their names. This is unfortunate for the simple villain because the fuzz has to make quite sure that he does not know. He is often tired when he finally comes up before the magistrate.
(B) The slightly less simple villain with a sensible streak of cowardice who learns of the capture of villain (A) and, at dead of night, takes his £1000 in used notes, dumps them in the nearest public lavatory, telephone-kiosk or other evil-smelling place and, in the morning, resumes his honest trade of scrap-metal merchant or whatever.
(C) The mealy-mouthed person who did nothing but ‘finger’ the caper slits open his Softa-Slumba mattress and tucks his £25,000 therein while his wife is getting her blue-rinse at the hairdressers. After eight or nine months, when he thinks all is safe, he buys a bungalow and pays the deposit in cash. Two nice gentlemen from the Inland Revenue call in for a chat; they go away quite satisfied. While he is heaving sigh of relief, two other nice gentlemen in blue uniforms call in for a chat and suggest that he pack a toothbrush and a pair of pyjamas.
(D) Now we are among the Brass, the higher echelons of the piece of villainy under discussion. This villain, called (D), is old-fashioned; he believes that a numbered account in a Swiss bank is as safe as the Houses of Parliament. He hasn’t heard about Guy Fawkes. He has heard about Interpol but he believes it is designed to protect chaps like him – chaps who have numbered accounts in Swiss banks. His trial is long, expensive and complicated. He gets a nice job in the prison library but horrid things happen to him in the showers.
(E) He thinks that he can run for it; he has two passports. His share is, perhaps, £150,000. His arithmetic is not good: that kind of money is very nice in, say, South Norwood, but it sort of dwindles as you scoot around the world at today’s prices, especially if you feel bound to arrange for your ever-loving wife to meet you in Peru or places like that.
(F) Yes, well, (F) is nearly the smartest of the bunch. First he tucks away a handy little sum like £20,000 in a safe place in case he gets nicked. (£20,000 will get you out of any prison in the world, everyone knows that.) Then he takes the rest of his ill-gotten g’s and, having bought a dinner-jacket far above his station in life, he joins one of those gaming-clubs where they sneer at you if you are seen with anything so plebeian as a £10 note. He buys a couple of hundred poundsworth of chips; plays at this table and that and, in the small hours of the morning, gives the lovely cashier-lady a handful of chips and bank-notes, say, £2000, telling her to credit his account. He gives her a tenner for herself and she assumes that he has won. He does this discreetly for months, sometimes seeming to lose but usually winning. Every once in a while the lovely cashier-lady tells him that he has an awful lot of money in his account and he lets a big cheque which he can prove to be gambling-winnings slide into his account at the bank. You can legalize about a hundred thousand a year in this way if you are careful.
(G) He is the man who organized the whole thing. (G) is very rich already. There are no problems for him; his holding-companies can make his one-third of a million vanish like a snowflake on a frying-pan. I’m sure there’s a moral there somewhere.
If it comes to that, I daresay there’s a better moral in my book of Rembrandt etchings.
Back in my slum on the fourth floor in Upper Brook Street (W1) (I know it’s a duplex, but I still think it’s robbery at £275 a week) I was happily tipping-in my new purchase into the Complete Etchings when Jock sidled in.
‘Jock,’ I said severely, ‘I have repeatedly asked you not to sidle. I will not have this sidling. It smacks of the criminal classes. If you wish to better yourself you must learn to shimmer. What’s the name of those naval-outfitter chaps at the Piccadilly end of Bond Street?’
‘Gieves?’
‘That’s it. There you are, you see,’ I said, completely vindicated. Jock is not good at these things. He waited until I had fully relished my vindication; then he uttered.
‘I got what rows ’e wrote.’ I stared at the fellow. He showed none of the outward signs of brain-disease but these signs would not necessarily have been apparent, you see, for it is well known in art-dealing circles that you could stuff Jock’s brain into any hedgehog’s navel without causing the little creature more than a moment’s passing discomfort, while Jock, on his part, would not notice the loss until the next time he played dominoes.
‘What rows who wrote?’ I asked at length.
‘Nah, Rosie,’ he said, ‘me deaf-and-dumb mate. It’s his monniker.’
‘Goodness, is he one of those? How awkward for him, with his disabilities. I mean, however does he lisp and titter in s
ign-language?’
‘Nah. His whole monniker is Rosenstein or Rosinbloom or one of them Eyetalian names but he doesn’t like you to use it because he hates foreigners.’
‘I see. Well, let’s have it.’ He handed me a newspaper folded open at the Sports Page, around the margins of which Rosie had done his dictation. I gave him marks for camouflage: the only way a ruffianly publisher’s nark can be seen reading or writing without arousing suspicion is when he is at work picking his daily loser, and figuring out what a pound each way at nine to four will bring in after tax.
This is what he had written. ‘I cooden get sat were I cood see the Chink’s moosh but I cood see the lady ok she has lovly lips –’ I frowned here ‘– I cood read ever word she said.’ I unfrowned. ‘She said No Mr Lee i have explained befor I don’t want a million pounds. I already have a million pounds. I want the use of your organization. I have the women and you have the organization. I want to sell no part of my end. You will do very well out of your part of the operation. I can finance my self. Now for the last time is it a deal or not. Good. Now I must go shopping. I hav to buy my husband a present to put him in a good mood for what I am goin to ask him to do about the womin.’
I read it again and again. Aghast is the only word for what I was. Of course I had no illusion about Johanna’s saintliness – she was very rich, wasn’t she? – but the White Slave Trade! The sheer brilliance and audacity of reviving that wonderfully old-fashioned way of turning an honest million dazzled me. Johanna was, clearly, even cleverer than I had thought. The only bit that gnawed at my conscience was the suggestion that I was to be involved. It has always been my policy that wives should be free, nay, encouraged to do their own things but that spouses should not be conscripted. Let wives give cocktail parties until the distillery runs dry, but do not ask me to be polite to their awful friends. Let them take up knitting or some such wholesome exercise, but do not expect me to hold the wool. Above all, let them dabble in a little lucrative illegality – but on no account ask C. Mortdecai to participate except in helping to spend the proceeds with his well-known good taste.
The Mortdecai Trilogy Page 22