The Mortdecai Trilogy

by Bonfiglioli, Kyril

  ‘Service Webley .38 on a .45 frame,’ I sneered. ‘Should be in a museum. Kicks like – like a female butler.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said placidly. ‘But it suits me.’ She absently loosed off a round which whirred past my ear and caused a log in the fireplace to leap pyrotechnically. My ears sang with the roar and adrenalin squirted from my every pore. ‘What weapon would you prefer, Mr Mortdecai?’ I pulled myself together.

  ‘Smith & Wesson,’ I said, ‘.38 Special Airweight.’

  She nodded approvingly, strode to the house-telephone.

  ‘Armourer? Ah, Nancy; one Airweight, one box of graphite cartridges, one of solid, four spare clips, cleaning kit and a Thurston pocket holster.’

  ‘Shoulder-holster, please,’ I said defiantly, for my figure does not lend itself to the trousering of pistols.

  ‘No, Mortdecai, you’ll be wearing combat clothes, no time to unzip your blouse, you know.’ A chubby little matron bustled up with two cardboard boxes. The pistol was still in its original grease. I handed it back in a lordly way.

  ‘Pray clean it,’ I said lordlily, ‘and while you’re about it, file off that silly foresight.’

  ‘We look after our own pieces here,’ she snapped. ‘And you can have the foresight off in the morning when you report to the armoury. That’s if I decide you don’t need it.’

  ‘Clean it now, Mortdecai,’ said the Commandant, ‘and load it with the graphite rounds. They pulverize on contact, you know, quite harmless unless you get one in the eye. You’ll just have time before dinner.’

  The butler, Ethel, showed me to my room and, as I lowered my suitcase to the ground, planted a succulent kiss on the top of my head, just where the hair is thinning a bit. I stared at her. She stuck out her tongue. ‘You didn’t hurt me a bit,’ she pouted.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ I said ambiguously.

  The room was Spartan: an iron cot, hard mattress, no sheets, no heating, two rough blankets, a deal table and a kitchen chair. I have been in cosier prison cells. I broke out one of my half-bottles and sucked at it vigorously while I cleaned the pistol. Soon both it and I were ‘clean, bright and slightly oiled’ as we used to say in the Army. I loaded a clip with the graphite rounds but thoughtfully introduced, first of all, one solid cartridge into the bottom of the clip. Emerging from the shower I heard a rasping boom from some hidden loud-speaker: ‘Mortdecai – moving target outside your window – SHOOT!’ Shrugging a shoulder, I scooped up the Airweight from under my pillow, flung back the curtains, flung back the casement window, all in jig-time. I could just see a shadowy man-size target trundling jerkily across the lawn. Flipping off the safety-catch I squeezed the trigger. There was a resounding click.

  ‘Lesson Two, Mortdecai,’ said the loudspeaker, ‘always keep your pistol loaded and within reach.’

  ‘It was bloody loaded,’ I snarled.

  ‘I know. I took the clip out while you were under the shower. Careless, very.’

  ‘How the hell am I supposed to shower with a pistol about me?’ I yelled.

  ‘Sponge-bag,’ said the loudspeaker succinctly.

  When the dinner-gong roared I strolled warily downstairs, happy in the awareness of my pistol-heavy trousers pocket. There’s nothing like a nice new pistol to dispel a feeling of castration. Not a soul struck at me. Taking a line from the grimness of my quarters, I had been dreading dinner but I was agreeably surprised. Hare soup, a casserole of pheasant with apples à la Normande, a soufflé and one of those savouries that women make, all washed down with a couple of decilitres of something which tasted quite like Burgundy.

  ‘Excellent,’ I said at length, ‘quite delicious,’ and beamed amiably down the huge refectory-table. There were two or three silent men present but most of the staff and students were women, some six or eight of whom were undeniably nubile. Following my gaze, the Commandant said off-handedly, ‘Would you care for a girl to keep you warm tonight?’ I gulped, which is not a thing one should do when drinking brandy, it makes it go down the wrong way. Much of mine went down my shirt-front. ‘I daresay,’ she went on absently, ‘that one or two of them will be feeling randy – it’s all that violence on television, you know. No? Well, perhaps you’re wise. Need all your strength tomorrow.’

  I turned my attention frantically upon the middle-aged woman on my right. She proved to be one of those astrology-bores that you meet everywhere nowadays and promptly asked me under which Sign I had been born.

  Haven’t the least idea,’ I said, pishing and rushing freely.

  ‘Oh, but you must know! What is your birth-date?’ It seemed only civil to tell her, especially since she did not ask the year, but I took the opportunity to deliver my set-piece lecture about the stultifying folly of those who believe, in the third quarter of the Twentieth Century, that being born at one particular time and place will govern the whole of one’s character and future. ‘Why,’ I perorated, ‘this would mean that every triplet would be run over by a ’bus at the same time as his two siblings! Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote a sentence which has been the guiding-star of my life: “Children dear, never believe anything which insults your intelligence.” Reading that at an impressionable age has, I am confident, formed my nature much more positively than the moment, some er, chrm, forty years ago when a fashionable accoucheur glanced at an unreliable time-piece and, realizing that he had another appointment, decided to spare my mother any further vexation by calling for the high forceps. Surely you can see that?’

  She, the astrology-bore, was wearing that rapt, attentive look which women use when wishing to flatter pompous idiots. Being an experienced pompous idiot, I know that this look means that the woman is not listening at all but is merely waiting for you to stop making noises with your mouth so that she can do a spot of uttering herself.

  (As it happens, and if you must know, I was born on the last day of September, because my father begat me on the Christmas night of a year which I do not propose to divulge; I know this to be true because my father told me so in front of my mother and several of her friends – he was like that. When he saw my face fall he quite misconstrued my feelings and explained apologetically that he had been drunk at the time. My mother did not speak to him for weeks afterwards but few people noticed this because, by then, she was not speaking to him much at all, anyway. She was a woman of great beauty and dignity, although unpleasing in almost every other way you could imagine and a good few which you could not.)

  When I had drawn to a close and had vouchsafed my birth-date the astrology lady seemed thrilled. ‘You’re a Libra, then, how wonderful! Guess what my sign is. Oh, do!’ I ransacked my mind for zodiacal signs. ‘Virgo?’ I said.

  ‘Silly,’ she said, lightly slapping my wrist. ‘I’m a ram – Aries. We rams are made for Libras.’ Well, I couldn’t correct her Latin, could I, so I just eyed her guardedly. Her face would have passed for an old but once expensive handbag and the crocodile-hide of her neck and bosom would have attracted a snappy bid from Gucci’s luggage-factory. ‘Not Wanted On Voyage’ was the phrase which sprang to mind.

  ‘Oh, come, come,’ I said diffidently.

  ‘No, no – I must go, mustn’t I, Commandant? Goodnight, dear Libra. My name is Kitty, by the way … if you care to know.’ With that she left the table, smiling at me. People with teeth like hers should not smile. For a sickening moment I feared that she might be off to my bedroom, to await me there like a sacrificial ram.

  ‘Do please stop grinding your teeth, Mr Mortdecai,’ said the Commandant as soon as Kitty was out of earshot. ‘She is really a most capable person except for the astrology nonsense.’ I could not quite stop grinding the teeth.

  ‘If only,’ I grated, ‘if only such capable people would spare a moment to apply a dab of logic onto what they call their thinking; if only …’

  ‘If only,’ mocked the Commandant. ‘If only! Paah! That is a phrase for kiddies to say to their teddy-bears. If only your uncle had wheels he’d be a tea-trolley. Come to that, if only your
aunt had balls she’d be your uncle.’ I glowered at her, for this was, after all, not the Australian Embassy.

  ‘My aunts,’ I said in a rebuking sort of voice, ‘all possess balls. Indeed, I can call to mind few aunts who do not sport a cluster of such things. I cannot claim ever to have rummaged an aunt but I’m prepared to offer any amount of seven-to-three that …’

  ‘Enough!’ said the Commandant, raising a commanding hand. ‘No wagers are permitted here, pray remember that you are not in a WRNS mess.’ I would not have minded offering five-to-two against that proposition also, but took the coward’s way out and said that I was awfully sorry. Then I said that I was awfully tired, too, and asked permission to leave the festive board. (The stopper, I noticed, was firmly in the neck of the brandy-decanter.)

  I pined to clock up a few sleeping-hours but it seemed that I must first collect my ‘lessons’ from the Commandant’s Office; these proved to be an arm-aching load of Xeroxed brochures about how to Kill/Maim/Cheat/Lie/Deceive/Subvert/Communicate/Bewilder/Terrorize/Persuade/Forge/Impersonate/Evade/Explode/Compromise and do all sorts of other horrid things to other people. A second stack was about how to recognize Aircraft/Weapons/Ships/ Missiles/CIA Agents/Narcotics and Counterfeit Currency while at the same time Living in Rough Country/Surviving at Sea/Confuting Interrogative Techniques and Mastering Five Simple Ways of Suicide (three of them almost painless).

  Under my breath I muttered a short word concerning the hidden attributes of aunts.

  ‘Cheer up, Mortdecai,’ roared the Commandant, ‘you’re only here for three weeks and – only the first twenty days are painful!’ She must have got that one out of the Beano comic.

  ‘Ha ha,’ I said politely. ‘Goodnight, er, Madam.’

  ‘Goodnight … oh, wait a sec – catch!’ and with this she threw a blotting-pad towards me. Well, I wasn’t born yesterday, as I have often freely admitted. I let it fall at my feet, making no attempt to catch it, and I had the Airweight out and pointing at her equator before she had even begun to haul out her old Webley.

  ‘Oh, jolly good, Mortdecai,’ she crowed, ‘oh full marks!’

  ‘Old stuff,’ I said, closing the door behind me.

  The only nice thing that happened to me that day was two minutes later, that night. No one was in my bedroom: no sacrificial rams, no half-assed Amazons hoping to sublimate their castration-complexes by boffing me on the head or other soft, vulnerable parts. Someone had been there, all right, because my suitcase had been unlocked – I had expected that, for any school-boy, indeed, any airport luggage-handler can open the ordinary suitcase in a trice, using only a set of those feeler-gauges which you can buy at any garage. I was unconcerned, for the smaller suitcase is made of sterner stuff: it has a combination lock with three cylinders, each bearing ten numbers. I cannot say off-hand how many permutations this affords but I would guess that it would take the average chambermaid something like a million years to hit upon the right one. Even your average chamber maid does not have that kind of time to spare unless she is exceptionally ugly and there are no tired business-men in the hotel.

  ‘BAD, Mortdecai,’ quacked the loudspeaker as I drew a pair of pyjamas from the larger suitcase, ‘bad. Lesson Four.’

  ‘Three,’ I snapped.

  ‘No, four. Never leave incriminating matter in easily-opened luggage.’ I allowed myself a smug smirk.

  ‘Anything incrim …, that is to say, private, is in the other, smaller suitcase.’

  ‘The other, smaller suitcase was the suitcase I meant,’ said the loudspeaker. I tried the smaller, unopenable suitcase. It, too, was unlocked. As I gaped the hated voice squawked out again.

  ‘Our research has shown us that people in middle life find it difficult to memorize random numbers; they tend to utilize numbers which they are unlikely to forget. If you must set your lock to the numbers of your birthday – 30th of the 9th, right? – then never tell the date of your birthday to people like Kitty. That was Lesson Three.’

  I muttered something obscure.

  ‘What you suggest, Mortdecai, I have tried once or twice. It gave me little or no pleasure.’

  ‘I’m leaving,’ I said flatly. ‘Now.’

  ‘Ah, yes, well, that’s not really awfully easy: all students’ bedrooms are automatically time-locked and cannot possibly be re-opened until reveille. No, please don’t look at the window, don’t; the grounds are full of Fiona’s Dobermann Pinschers and the Dobermanns are full of blood-lust. You’d have to shoot an awful lot of them before you even got near the electrified fence and Fiona would be cross if you hurt even one of them. She lives for those doggies. She’s a sweet child but her temper is ungovernable and she will insist on carrying that silly old sawn-off shotgun.’

  I began to understand that the loudspeaker was trying to tell me something. I sat on the edge of the bed, for I always fume better in a seated posture. How, I asked myself, had the old she-butch known that I had been casting wistful looks at the window? My eye fell upon the big looking-glass which commanded both my bed and the entrance to the bathroom. I snapped out the light, stole to the mirror, flattened my nose against it. Sure enough, there was a faint glow to be discerned; the unmistakable glow of a cigarette being puffed upon by an ageing Girl Guide. It was the work of a moment to find my First Aid Kit, to tape a First Field Dressing across the mirror and to switch the light on again.

  ‘Oh, well done, Mortdecai, there’s good stuff in you after all.’ said the loudspeaker. ‘That was going to be Lesson Five, after the girls had watched you get into your sleeping-suit, ho ho.’

  I did not deign to answer but marched into the bathroom to ply an angry toothbrush and conceal one or two trifling matters which had not been in either suitcase. On the bathroom mirror a message was scrawled in lipstick: ‘PLEASE DO NOT HIDE THINGS IN THE LAVATORY CISTERN: IT ONLY MAKES WORK FOR THE PLUMBER.’

  Huddled in my comfortless bed, I made shift to study the thinnest of my lesson-brochures: the one entitled Mastering Five Simple Ways of Suicide, for this seemed to fall in with my mood at the time. I was shuddering my way through the passage about how to bite through the large blood-vessel at the base of the tongue and breathe in the resultant blood until asphyxia supervened, when the lights went out.

  ‘Soddem,’ I said to myself, composing myself to sleep.

  12 Mortdecai finally realizes that he is not attending a night-class in self-defence for old ladies

  Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet ’tis early morn:

  Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon your bugle horn.

  Locksley Hall

  Towards morning, in that half-awakened state when the worst and best dreams come, my repose was marred by hideous visions of female dominators: Catherine the Great, Mrs Bandaranaike, the Erinyes, Mrs Indira Gandhi, Leila Khaled, Ulrike Meinhof, Marion Coyle, Fusako Shigenobu, the Valkyries, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ermyntrude of the Bloody Sword, Mrs Golda Meir, Carrie Nation, the Empress Livia … all trooped before my inward eye, gibbering and cursing and waving their blood-boltered hands, red to the elbows. I was bracing myself to receive comfort from the vision of Mrs Margaret Thatcher, for I have ever been a staunch Tory, when to my delighted relief I was aroused into full wakefulness by a whirr and a clunk from the time-lock on my door.

  ‘Wakey wakey, Mortdecai,’ cackled the hateful loud-speaker. ‘Three minutes for a shower, one for brushing teeth, two for shaving. Draw a tracksuit from the Quartermaster in eight minutes, be at the Gym in ten. Any questions?’

  ‘Tea?’ I questioned feebly.

  ‘No, Mortdecai; PT. Do you a power of good. You can skip it if you like but the only entrance to the breakfast-hall is through the Gym.’

  PT was hell. People made me prance absurdly, climb up and down wall-bars, hurl myself at hateful vaulting-horses and try to do press-ups. Then they threw monstrous medicine-balls at me. I panted and groaned my way through it until a bell rang and we all trooped into the showers. They were communal, unsegregated showers. Kitty twin
kled at me as she soaped her luggage-like carcass and the younger girls played pranks on me.

  Breakfast, on the other hand, was unrivalled. It was one of those lovely country-house breakfasts where you lift the lids off silver dishes on the sideboard and find eggs and kidneys and chops and bacon and kippers and haddock and kedgeree and fried ham and devilled turkey and scrambled eggs and grilled tomatoes and, when you sit down, there are two sorts of tea as well as coffee and jam and three sorts of marmalade and people keep bringing you more and more hot toast. I ate heartily for, although I do not love such things, I knew that I must keep my strength up, you see.

  ‘This is your last time to sit at the head of the table beside me,’ said the Commandant. I made rueful noises, muffled by the piece of toast (laden with that black, chunky marmalade which Oxford makes so well) which I was gnashing. ‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘another guest will arrive before luncheon and it is the privilege of the latest-arrived to sit on my right hand, naturally.’ I opened my mouth to make the kind of joke that chaps like me make but closed it again.

  ‘Quite understand,’ I gurgled, sluicing a recalcitrant shard of toast down with another cup of capital coffee.

  ‘Ladies!’ she suddenly bellowed – ignoring the weedy males at the table – ‘Ladies. Captain Mortdecai will be reporting to the Armoury in five minutes to shoot-in his new pistol. According to the custom of the College, when he emerges he will be Fair Game for 24 hours.’ People laughed and said ‘hooray’ and things like that, but the piece of toast jolted to a halt on its way down the Mortdecai gizzard.

  ‘?’ I asked courteously.

  ‘It means,’ she explained courteously, ‘that from 1010 hours you are Fair Game. It is the custom here with new students, whatever their age, sex or weight. Let me put it like this: it will be open season on C. Mortdecai from the hour stated. Your fellow students will take all reasonable care to avoid maiming you seriously, for it is all in fun, you see. Some of your predecessors have survived their Fair Game Day with little more than the loss of a tooth or two.’ She gazed at the butter melting into her toast and heaved what might well have been a sigh of regret for happier days, days when no pat of butter durst slink into a piece of toast without written orders signed by herself.