I travelled by tube – subway? – to the nearest station to my City lodgings and entered the Public Lavatory. (It was early in the day, you see, the Stock Exchange was busy and Parliament was in session so there was little danger of being accosted.) I changed into the suit, the shoes, the cap.
A few minutes later; well, there I was at the window, sliding the telescopic sight onto the Mannlicher, my fingers twitching with trepidation about the abominable act I was about to perform – twitching, too, with fury and revulsion at the way my skinny landlady had unequivocally brushed herself against me on the stairs and suggested that I might join her for ‘a glass of summink’ in her boudoir.
‘Oftervords, oftervords,’ I had mumbled, trying to muster a leer although well knowing – nay, hoping – that there would be no oftervords.
So there I was, the lovely Spanish mahogany stock of the rifle becoming more and more slippery with sweat, no matter how often I wiped my guilty hands on the trouser-legs of the hated suit. My wristlet-watch, although a creation of Patek Philippe himself, ticked ever more slowly, as though it had been dipped in the very best butter.
At last there was to be heard a distant sound of hooraying, then a sort of galumphing noise which betokened the advent of horse-drawn carriages full of Royals and their Head of State guests. I wiped the hands once more, allowed the rifle-muzzle to protrude a further inch or two (for I could descry no security-idiots on the rooftops across the street) and cuddled the butt to my shoulder, telescopic eye-piece to watery eye. Here they came – in the bloody State Landau, sure enough – all of them doing that wonderful, inimitable Royal wave of the hand which only Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother can do properly. Obviously, I couldn’t do it: the murder, I mean, not the wave. I must have been mad to have thought that I could. (When St Peter, at the Pearly Gates, gives me that form to fill in, the only claim I shall be able to make in mitigation is that I never shot at a sitter in my life.) (Naturally, I don’t count rats, carrion-crows, ex-presidents of Uganda and that sort of thing.)
Nevertheless, my cowardly, regicide right hand seemed to have a life of its own; it drew back the bolt of the Mannlicher and shoved it forward to usher a cartridge into the breech. It jammed. The bolt, I mean – or rather the cartridge. I wrenched the bolt back fiercely until the distorted cartridge sprang free and whirred past my ear to strike a tasteful colour-print of Van Gogh’s ‘Two Pansies Sharing a Pot’. I crammed the bolt forward again and it jammed again. The cavalcade was about to pass the point where my field-of-fire would be ineffective. I cursed Jock with love and respect (I had checked those cartridges that very morning – who else could have nobbled them?) but, with thoughts of survival in my mind, wrestled with the bolt-action so that I could loose off just one shot to show that I had tried. It was just as I had cleared the third cartridge and clunked in a fresh clip that I found out why there had been no security-idiots lumbering about on the rooftops across the street. It was because they were kicking in the door of my squalid room. Just behind me.
Now there are two ways of kicking in doors. The first, which I was taught by a gentleman in Philadelphia, is quick, neat and almost soundless. These chaps used the other method. Had I been a dedicated villain I could have shot them into bite-sized helpings before they delivered the third kick, but my heart was not in it. When they at length tumbled in through the wreckage of the door I lifted them to their great feet and dusted them off courteously. The door had not been locked but I did not tell them this, I didn’t want to spoil their day. Each of them arrested me again and again, urging me to say things which might be used in evidence against me and sticking evidence-tabs on everything in sight, while the skinny landlady gibbered and squawked behind them, averring that she had suspected all along that I was not a true-born Englishman.
The copper’s voices were fierce, grave and proud. This was a Tower of London job, you see; your true regicide is not submitted to the squalor of Wormwood Scrubs where he might have to rub shoulders with muggers, wife-bashers, child-rapists and common property-developers. I was special. (My only regret, as they snucked the handcuffs about my wrists, was that I had not made it perfectly clear to Jock that the little jars of partridge-breasts in jelly are quite useless without fresh brown bread and butter.) The coppers scarcely hit me at all but they searched me thoroughly for incriminating documents such as five-pound notes, gold cigarette-cases and so forth but all they found was the receipted bill for the suit I was wearing. I hope they did not give GENTS’ WARDROBES PURCHASED a bad time.
The frisking was disgracefully inefficient – I had to remind them about the small of my back, where evil men often tape a ‘shiv’ or ground-down razor. While I giggled three tall men loomed in the doorway, brushing aside the debris with fastidious feet. No common British coppers, these, the very feet told one that. They were in fact Colonel Blucher and a brace of his myrmidons. Blucher brandished a plastic triptych bespattered with the marks of important rubber stamps. The coppers stopped arresting me and started calling Blucher ‘Sir’. Someone told the landlady to shut up, for which relief much thanks, and there was a sort of tableau. Then Blucher thanked the bobbies civilly but in the flat sort of voice which means ‘fuck off’.
I do not know who reimbursed the landlady for her burst door and shattered dreams but it was not I. As we left she made a gesture which she should not have known how to make, for she was clearly not a showjumper.
‘In Ongary,’ I told her, ‘ve make zat sign like zis’ – and I demonstrated, using fewer fingers.
Inexplicably, Blucher seemed pleased with me. Inexplicably, too, he seemed incurious about my regicidal ploy but I told him all about it nevertheless, for attempted assassination always makes one babble; everyone knows that.
‘And I suppose it was your lot who jimmied the cartridges,’ I ended, gratefully.
‘Why, no, Mr Mortdecai; it wasn’t us at all.’
‘Ah, then Jock is as patriotic as I suspected all along.’
‘Well, no, I wouldn’t say it was Jock, either.’
‘Who then?’
‘I really couldn’t say.’ I knew what that meant. I thought I knew what that meant.
They dropped me off at the wrong end of Brook Street, for security reasons I daresay. The walk did me good. Jock opened the door with an expressionless face and, as I passed through the kitchen, thrust a lusty drink into my hand with a similar lack of emotion. The first sip told me that he had understood that this was no time for such niceties as soda-water.
Johanna was in the drawing-room, her lovely eyes gummed to the television set, whereon there was a chap playing something wonderfully tedious on a tin-whistle made of solid platinum.
‘Look, Johanna,’ I said apologetically …
‘SSHHHH!’ she said. (There are certain instruments which seem to exercise an unaccountable fascination on female human beings. Did you know, for instance, that in ancient Athens there was a law against chaps playing flutes under girls’ windows? There was nothing about giving them bunches of flowers, boxes of chocolates or mink coats, but playing the flute was reckoned to be taking an unfair advantage; even clever girls succumbed to it. I’m not making that up, I’m really not; ask any Greek Historian. Ask him in that lucid interval between the after-luncheon nap and the cocktail hour.)
When the chap had finished his tootling and was shaking the spit out of his valuable whistle, I moistened my own whistle with what was left of the valuable Scotch and said –
‘Look, Johanna, I’m awfully sorry but …’
‘It’s all right, Charlie dear, please don’t go on. I couldn’t bear to hear you explaining how you failed me. Even the best men can break under stress.’ I thought about that one, for I knew that she was not a woman to use words carelessly. Many a bitter rejoinder and witty retort sprang to mind.
‘Ah, well, yes,’ was what I decided to say. Even she could not think of a riposte to that one. We dined early, later, because this was the night when our lovely Italian cook comes and ‘obliges’ an
d she likes to get away early because of what she calls ‘Binko’. (You probably won’t have heard of ‘Bingo’, it’s a game where the odds are slightly worse against the player than at the ‘fruit-machine’ but you don’t have to wear your palm out pulling the handle. It’s jolly good for the economy too, they tell me; you see, if a chap earning £80 a week is giving his wife £20 of that for Bingo and encouraging greyhounds himself with a similar amount, well, he’s not going to settle for any lousy, vile-capitalistic differential of bloody 5%, is he?)
We dined early, off a simple bollito misto and in a flurry of sparkling conversation like, ‘Pass the salt, please, dear,’ and ‘Oh, dear, I’m sorry about this wine.’ My final jeu d’ esprit was, ‘Johanna, darling, I think I’m going to get an early night, d’you mind?’ She was ready for that punch; she gave me her sweetest smile and said that she didn’t mind a bit; there was a horror movie on TV starting right now.
It must have been two hours later when she crept into my dressing-room and said that the horror-movie had frightened her dreadfully.
‘There, there,’ I mumbled sleepily, patting her where her nightdress should have been. Then she asked me what had gone wrong in the assassination ploy and I told her that the cartridge just wouldn’t slide into the breech. She couldn’t seem to comprehend at first, so I sort of demonstrated. A few minutes later she said that she almost understood except the bit about the bolt-action. I went downstairs and made a couple of drinks. Playing for time, you understand.
She fell asleep perhaps half an hour later; ballistics is a very boring subject.
A little before dawn she shook me awake again. I was surly; I always am at that hour.
‘Charlie, dear,’ she said, ‘there’s one thing I don’t understand.’ I made unconvincing sleep-noises but to no avail. ‘You see, Charlie, there were supposed to be three cartridges in the clip, weren’t there?’
‘Oh, very well,’ I said.
10 Mortdecai is given a perfectly simple, nay delightful task and makes a dog’s breakfast of it
… And the thicket closed
Behind her and the forest echo’d ‘fool’.
Merlyn and Vivien
‘All the same, Charlie dear,’ she said as I pushed a listless rasher around my breakfast-plate, ‘all the same, you didn’t do awfully well, did you? With the assassination, I mean? I bet a CIA man would have checked every cartridge; the CIA brass accepts no excuses, they say.’ The only retort I could think of was one such as I could never think of using a gently-nurtured millionairess, so I held my tongue and stabbed spitefully at a fried egg. ‘Maybe,’ she went on, ‘that assignment was a little tough for you – as you often say, you are no longer a young man, are you?’ Employing a strength of wrist and hand which I did not know I still possessed, I divided a slice of crisp fried bread with one stroke of the knife, sending half of it skimming across the room like a clay pigeon. ‘So,’ she said, ‘I have thought of a little task for you which you will find simple and delightful.’
I made guarded, mistrustful noises which may or may not have been audible over the munching of fried bread.
‘All you have to do is to make friends – make great friends – with a beautiful young woman. She is a sort of business-associate of mine in a confidential enterprise and I have a feeling that she is leaking. Oh do stop raising your eyebrows in that silly way, dear; you know I mean that she has been chatting a bit too freely with our uh competitors. I want you to get close to her, spend freely as though you were tired of carrying all that money around; this will make her gaze at you lovingly. Then start to wheedle; see if she is as careless a talker as I suspect. You might hint that you are a researcher journalist for one of the English Sunday papers, hunh?’
My knife and fork crashed down on my plate – a lesser plate would have cracked from side to side – and I stood up, giving an Arctic glare which would have withered a lesser woman.
‘There are some things,’ I said stiffly, ‘which a chap simply cannot be asked to do. Assassination, yes. Impersonating a Sunday journalist, no.’
‘Forgive me, dear,’ she said hastily, ‘I was perhaps lacking in, uh, insight when I suggested that. Just hint, then, that you are a heavy investor and that you have heard that she might be on the inside of some nice little deal such as you love to buy a piece of and that you have a wallet to prove it. But get close to her first, win her confidence; I’m sure she will find you adorable. Well, gosh, I do, don’t I?’
I sat down again but my breakfast no longer held any charms for me; it looked like a cruel parody of a painting by Kandinsky.
‘Very well,’ I said at last, ‘how and where do I make pals with this lady?’
‘Tonight, darling. It’s all arranged. Her name is Loretta. You are to be her partner at a reception: it’s only at one of those Gulf Arab Embassies so you don’t have to hunt for a white tie and tails, a simple tuxedo will do. Sorry, I mean dinner-jacket.’
Loretta proved to have one of those wonderfully flower-like, vulnerable faces; her eyes seemed always to be on the point of brimming with happy tears and her generous lips seemed to have been bruised with a thousand savage kisses. I found myself longing to protect her, which is what it’s all about really, isn’t it? Bridegroom though I was, I became painfully desirous of finding whether the rest of her bore out the promise of that lovely face.
After the reception and after what passes as a buffet in that class of Embassy she shuddered delicately at my suggestion of a visit to a night-club. (I, too, shuddered a little but mine was a shudder of relief at not having to spend a great deal of money. I mean, I’m not mean, I’m really not, but fifty pounds for cheap champagne and a surplus of decibels has never struck me as good value. ‘Quantum meruit,’ is what I say.)
‘Take me home,’ she murmured. Her murmur was of the brand which sends the familiar tingle galloping up from the base of the spine to the dorsal region. I took her. Home, I mean. ‘Home’ proved to be an apartment in a discreetly splendid block of flats off Curzon Street. The porter discreetly failed to see us but his back was benign. If ever a porter’s back registered the words ‘Bless you, my children,’ that porter’s back did so.
At the door of her apartment she handed me the key – I cannot bear bossy women who pretend to be able to open a door unaided – and stood facing me in such a position that I would have to stand very close to her indeed in order to reach the keyhole. Her great, violet-coloured eyes gazed up at me, swimming with the aforesaid unshed tears, her lips trembled tremulously and, in short, she was exuding all those infinitesimal signals which are supposed to tell a chap that a girl expects to be kissed, and that right speedily. I fell to the task with a will. She was very good at it. When her breathing quickened I found the keyhole and, still locked in each other’s arms, we fox-trotted into her apartment. It was a lavish sort of pad, full of flowers and dominated by a monstrous sofa drawn up in front of a blazing fire of genuine logs. She vanished for a moment and returned bare-footed with a bottle of Armagnac and two glasses. I forget what the Armagnac was like, I was spellbound by the sight of her perfectly-shaped little toes as she twiddled them in front of the blaze.
As a conversational opener I lamely pointed out that this was well-known to be a sure way of catching chilblains and, inexplicably, she burst into laughter. Then she fell upon me frantically. Our mouths met and clamped together with all the mindless determination of a pair of bar-magnets. For a minute or two, or it may have been three, nothing was to be heard but the succulent sounds of face-chewing, the crackle of the logs and the bee-loud noise of certain zip-fasteners. (If ever I am forced by the soaring price of blackmail to write my memoirs, I have determined to entitle them The Zip is my Undoing.)
Suddenly, when it became abundantly clear that Loretta complaisantly expected me to work my wicked will on her, I unstuck myself from her embrace with a guilty start. Was I not a bridegroom? Was I not in love with my bride Johanna? The answers were ‘Definitely’ and ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ in that order. I
had been told to ‘get close’ to Loretta – was I, perhaps, exceeding my brief? Loretta was languorously making it clear that I was certainly exceeding my briefs, if you will forgive a little vulgarity just this once.
‘Look, ah, darling,’ I gabbled, ‘I’ve just had the most awful thought.’
‘It’s all right,’ she murmured, ‘I took my pill this morning.’
‘No no no, I didn’t mean that; I meant that I absolutely promised to telephone my, ah, business manager before –’ I stole a glance at my watch ‘– before midnight. He flies to Frankfurt or one of those places at crack of dawn. Could I possibly …?’
‘Hurry,’ she said, handing me the telephone. I dialled. Johanna’s cool and lovely voice answered. Summoning up what rusty remains of the German language I could recall, I addressed her throatily.
‘Ah, Herr, er, Johann! Hier ist Charlie Mortdecai!’
‘Darling, are you drunk already?’
‘No, no,’ I cried, still employing the German tongue, ‘canst thou German understand?’
‘Well, sure, Charlie dear; your German is a little different from mine but I think I can make out.’
‘Good. Understanding is what I need shall. There is here something of a small difficulty. To retain the confidence of our friend it seems necessary that I to bed take her must. What shall I do? Hullo? Hullo? Canst thou me hear?’
‘Yes, dear. You mean you want a “Green Card”, hunh?’
‘What is that? Ah, yes, now I understand.’
‘Well, OK, just this once. But Charlie … ’
‘Ja, Herr Johann?’
‘You are not to enjoy it.’
‘No, Herr Johann. Goodnight.’
‘Oh, and Charlie?’
‘Ja?’
‘Save some, hunh?’
‘Zu befehl, Herr Johann,’ I said. I wiped a furtive bead of sweat from the brow and hung up. Turning back to Loretta I said, ‘Sorry about that, darling. Frantically important business. Sure you understand.’
The Mortdecai Trilogy Page 25