The Mortdecai Trilogy

by Bonfiglioli, Kyril

  ‘Shchroombleshly,’ she said, indistinctly.

  ‘How much did that Wigmore Street wank-shrink cost you?’

  ‘A thousand,’ she said, clearing her throat.

  ‘And the Rouault?’

  ‘Nothing. No, really, nothing – I just happened to have heard that Gertie Weltschmerzer was having to find a really serious sum of money to pay her last-husband-but-one not to publish his memoirs, so I called her and congratulated her on the convenient burglary and sort of dropped the name of the president of her insurance firm who happens to be an old buddy of mine and she made the sort of noises that rich women make – you know, like this …’

  ‘Later,’ I said. ‘First the narrative.’

  ‘Where was I? Oh yes, when she stopped making noises like a gobbler – that’s what we call a turkey in the States – I sort of reminded her that the Rouault couldn’t have been burgled because she’d sold it to me just a couple of days before. She had to think about that for a while because she’s a little dumb, you know? and then she said why, sure she remembered and she hoped my husband would enjoy it. That’s all, except that I feel I ought to check that my husband does enjoy it.’

  I managed to enjoy it although it was, as I have said, quite indecently early in the morning.

  Jock, announcing his imminent appearance by a polite cough which almost took the door off its hinges (I have taught him that good servants never knock), brought in a tray for Johanna laden with the sort of coffee which you and I drink after dinner but which Daughters of the Revolution pour into their stomachs at crack of dawn. Small wonder that the American Colonies were the first to win their independence – if that’s what they still call it. Before I could doze off again my own tray arrived, just a few eggs, a half-dozen slices of toast and a steaming pot of well-judged tea. Jock, you see, although not bred to service, has a heaven-sent knowledge of what the young master will require in the way of tea. I would pit him against any Wigmore Street physician when it comes to prescribing tea: there are times, as I’m sure you know, when these things matter. I mean, an art-dealer who has nothing to face that day but a brisk flurry of bidding at Sotheby’s needs naught but the soothing Oolong. A morning at Christie’s indicates the Lapsang Souchong. A battle-royal at Bonham’s over, say, a Pater which only one other dealer has spotted, calls for the Broken Orange Pekoe Tips – nay, even the Earl Grey itself. For an art-dealer in terror of his life, however, and one who has valiantly embarked on Part Two of his honeymoon in early middle age, only two specifics are in the field: Twining’s Queen Mary’s Blend or Fortnum’s Royal. What I’d call a two-horse race. I forget which it was; I only remember that I slunk out of bed before its fortifying effect made me forget that I am no longer a youngster. (That’s all right about the ‘size of the dog in the fight and the size of the fight in the dog’ but art-dealers in their late forties have livers to consider; other organs have to take their place in the queue.)

  Jock really is a compassionate man when he sets his mind to it: it was not until I was under the shower that he slipped me the bad news.

  ‘Mr Charlie,’ was how he phrased it, ‘Mr Charlie, there’s two gemmun downstairs waiting to see you.’

  ‘Two gentlemen?’ I said, soaping freely the parts which I can still reach, ‘Two? Nonsense, Jock, I only know three gentlemen altogether; one of them is serving a life-sentence for murdering an unwanted mistress, another deals in rare books in Oxford and the third has gone to the bad … publishing, something like that.’ He heard me out patiently; he knows the difference between prattle and orders; then he said, ‘I di’n’t mean gemmun when I said gemmun, Mr Charlie, I only said gemmun because you don’t like me to say –’

  ‘Quite right, Jock,’ I said, raising a soapy hand. ‘Are you trying to say that they are art-dealers?’ He wagged a regretful head.

  ‘Nar. They’re fuzz. Big Brass Fuzz.’ I turned the shower to cold; this never fails to make the intellect surge around.

  ‘Have we any tea-bags in the kitchen? We have? Really? Well, make them some tea and tell them that I shall be down presently.’

  ‘Ah, Jaggard, Blackwell!’ I cried as I bounced into the drawing-room a few moments later, ‘Got some tea, eh?’ The two men turned and looked at me. They had no tea, nor were they Jaggard and Blackwell. Nor did they get up. They were large, blank-faced, empty-eyed coppers, but for some reason my ‘lighthouse’ started to flicker a bit. They were almost like coppers but not quite.

  ‘Mr Mortdecai?’ asked one of them.

  ‘True,’ I said.

  ‘Interpol. Robinson, London.’ He pointed to the other chap. ‘Hommel, Amsterdam.’ That made sense; the lighthouse ceased to flash. Interpol are not like other boys and Dutch fuzz does not look like English fuzz.

  ‘How can I help you?’ I asked.

  ‘Get your hat, please.’ I thought about that.

  ‘Warrant cards?’ I said diffidently. They gave me the world-weary look which policemen give to clients who have read too many thrillers. I strolled about aimlessly until I could get a squint down the Dutchman’s jacket. Sure enough, he was wearing a shoulder-holster bursting with what looked like the good old Browning HPM 1935 – a pistol which contains 14 rounds of 9mm Parabellum and weighs a couple of pounds unloaded, a splendid weapon for slapping people on the side of the head with but nevertheless an odd choice of ironmongery for anyone who isn’t expecting an invasion.

  ‘I’ve got one, too,’ said the English jack.

  ‘Am I under arrest,’ I asked, ‘and if so, what for?’ The Dutchman allowed himself a sigh, or it may have been a yawn.

  ‘Yost get the hat, Mr Mortdecai,’ he said. ‘Please.’ At that point Johanna entered the room and gave a startled glance at our visitors – a glance of recognition, I’d have said.

  ‘Don’t go with these men, Charlie,’ she said sharply.

  ‘They are armed,’ I explained.

  ‘So am I,’ growled Jock from the other doorway, his beefy hand full of Luger.

  ‘Thank you, Jock, but please put it down now. The gentleman on the sofa is holding a gun under his mackintosh and I fancy it’s pointing at my gut. Also, Mrs Mortdecai is present.’ I watched Jock slowly figuring out the odds, praying that he would make the right decision. I often boast that I am not especially afraid of dying but on the other hand I have this heavy addiction to life and I’m told that the withdrawal symptoms are shocking. Finally he placed the Luger on the floor – you do not drop automatic pistols – and, at a gesture from the Dutch chap, kicked it across the carpet. He kicked it in such fashion that it slid far under the big break-front bookcase: he is not just an ugly face, you know.

  One of them ushered Johanna and Jock into the kitchen and locked them in; the other didn’t rip out the telephone cord, he unscrewed the mouthpiece, took out the diaphragm and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Extension?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In the bedroom.’ He walked me there and repeated the procedure. He was good. Then we went. Their motor-car was a sensible, Rover-like vehicle and I was made to sit in the front, beside the Dutchman who was driving. The English copper – well, I was still not sure that he wasn’t – leaned forward and said that I must not do anything foolish because his pistol was pointed at my left kidney. Now, every schoolboy knows that if a man means to shoot you he does so there and then, without shilly-shallying. Clearly, they wanted me alive, so the threat was idle. I hoped it was idle. I craned over my shoulder for a glimpse of the sidearm in question: he snarled at me to face the front. The pistol was there all right and I had had just enough time to see that it was one of those monstrous US Government Colt.45 automatics which can blow a hole through a brick wall. What was nice about this particular weapon was that it was not wearing a silencer; to let off such a thing in a car would stop the traffic for miles. That was the third mistake they had made. I applied myself to thought.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ I asked idly.

&nbs
p; ‘Home,’ said the Dutchman. This was probably meant to be a joke. We sped eastward. As we passed St Paul’s I courteously pointed out its beauties to the Dutchman.

  ‘Shot op,’ he said.

  We sped further eastward, now in parts of London quite unfamiliar to me.

  ‘Where is “home”, please?’ I asked.

  The Englishman answered this time. ‘Home’s where the heart is,’ he said with all the jovial smugness of a large man holding a large pistol. ‘We’re just taking you somewhere nice and quiet where they can ask you a few questions, then if your lady wife delivers Mr Ree to Gerrard Street within twenty-four hours we let you go, don’t we?’

  ‘Shot OP!’ said the Dutchman. He seemed to be in charge. Those few words had made my day, however, for it was now clear that they were but the minions of another ‘they’ who needed to know something that I knew and that I was also a valuable hostage. I was more than ever sure that this was not a time for people to blow holes through the Mortdecai kidneys.

  When we came to a complicated road-junction, crammed with traffic and well-populated with uniformed policemen, I murmured to the Dutch chap that we drove on the left in England. He was, as a matter of fact, doing so but it gave him pause and the wheel wobbled. I snatched the ignition keys; the car stalled in the midst of a welter of furious traffic and I sprang out. Sure enough, they didn’t shoot at me. I ran over to the nearest ‘Old Bill’, gabbled that the driver was having a heart attack and where was the nearest telephone. He pointed to a kiosk then stamped majestically towards the car, which was now the centre of a tumult of block traffic.

  In the kiosk I frantically dialled my own number and rammed in a wasteful 10p piece. Johanna answered from the dressing-room extension which had not been noticed.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m in a phone-box, corner of …’ I read off what it said on the instrument ‘ … and I’ve got away from them but not for long. I’ll be …’ I frantically looked out of the kiosk, saw a great, grubby, warehouse-like building opposite with a name on it ‘ … Mycock’s Farm-cured Bacon,’ I read out.

  ‘This is no time for jokes, Charlie dear.’

  ‘Just get Jock here; fast.’ I replaced the receiver, did not even spare the time to check the returned coins box. I ran towards the excellent Mr Mycock. Inside the door an elderly slattern, redolent of Jeyes’ Fluid, pointed to where the guvnor would be. ‘He’s probably having his dinner,’ she added. ‘Out of a bottle.’ As soon as she was out of sight I changed direction again and again, diving into the abattoir’s labyrinth. The pong of scorched pig became excruciating; I longed for that Jeyes’ Fluid. The air was split by an appalling shriek – it was the dinner-time whistle but it gave me a bad moment. I pulled myself together, affecting the arrogant stroll of a Ministry of Health official looking for the germ Clostridium Botulinum. The workers who thronged out past me did not even spare me a glance, they were off to chance paratyphoid from beef pies at The Bunch of Grapes; they wouldn’t eat pork pies, they’d seen them being made. As I stalked proudly through the corridors, turning randomly every now and again in a purposeful sort of way, I was doing feverish sums in mental arithmetic concerned with how quickly Jock could possibly get here. It’s all very well being clever and devious, you see, but when you are eyeball-deep in lethal shit you need a thug – a thug who has coped with such situations since his first term in Borstal. Jock is just such a thug – few art-dealers could afford him – and I was confident that he would make all speed to the Mycock cochonnerie and would be properly equipped with one pair of brass knuckles, one Luger and, if he had been able to find the key, one Banker’s Special Revolver such as I keep in my bedside table. Twenty minutes was how I had the race handicapped. I had to survive for just twenty minutes.

  I squeezed past a cluster of bins marked PET-FOOD ONLY: WASH HANDS AFTER HANDLING and was about to thread my way through another lot marked IRELAND AND BELGIUM ONLY when I saw a large chap about thirty feet away, holding a pistol with two hands. He was the Dutchman. The pistol was pointed at me. The two-handed grip was perfectly good procedure according to the book they teach policemen with, but it seemed to me that if he was any good with that thing he would, at that range, have been holding it in one hand, pointing it at the ground a couple of yards in front of his feet. All the same, I froze, as any sensible chap would.

  ‘Comm, Mr Mortdecai,’ he said persuasively, ‘comm; you have donn the teatricals. Yost comm with the honds behind the head and no one will hort you.’ I started to breathe deeply; in, count ten, out – this is supposed to hyperoxygenate the system. Added to the adrenalin which was sloshing around in my blood-vessels, it had a salutary effect: I felt convinced that I could have held Cassius Clay for quite two rounds. Unless he got me against the ropes, of course.

  I went on hyperoxygenating; the Dutchman’s pistol roved up and down from my privates to my forehead. He was the first to become bored.

  ‘Mr Mortdecai,’ he said in a dangerous voice, ‘are you comming now?’ Well, I couldn’t resist a straight line like that, could I?

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘just breathing hard.’ While he was thinking about that I feinted a dive to the left, then, for my life, plunged to the right, behind the friendly bins of pig-pieces. ‘Rooty-toot-toot-toot’ went his shooter. One round went howling off the wall, the others pierced the bins. He was not quite as bad as I had thought but he was not as good as he thought. That two-handed grip, you see, gives you a grand one-off first shot but when you swing to another target you invariably loose off too soon. The good pistol-shooter always lowers his weapon when tracking the second target and only raises it again when he has it cold. Ask anyone. Wyatt Earp, for instance.

  I durst not give him time to change his magazine so I shed my jacket and slung it over the bins. ‘Rooty-toot-toot’ went the Browning. That made seven rounds expended, seven to go; even I could tell that. The floor sloped down in a gentle ramp towards him. I kicked over a couple of bins which rolled down the slope, dripping pig’s blood and goodness knows what else. He shot at them, for the Dutch are cleanly folk. Ten rounds gone, four to go. I raised an unoccupied bin-lid and slammed it onto the floor; he fired two more rounds, quite wildly.

  Where I had kicked the bins away I saw that there was a monstrous iron door with a lever instead of a handle. It looked like an excellent door to be behind.

  ‘Jackson!’ I bellowed – it seemed a plausible sort of name – ‘JACKSON! Don’t use the bombs: I’m coming out to take him myself.’ Hommel can scarcely have believed that, but he must have dithered a bit because I got that great iron door open and scrambled through it without a shot being fired at me. The room inside the door was cold as the tip of an Eskimo’s tool: it was, indeed, what the meat-trade calls a Cold Room. The lever on my side of the door had a position marked SECURE in red paint. I made it so. High up on two walls were those rubber-flap kind of entrances you see in hospitals; between them and through them ran an endless belt with large hooks. (Yes, just like a dirty weekend with a shark-fisher.) A pistol roared outside and a bullet spanged against the splendidly solid iron door. I sat with my back to the door and quaked, partly with cold, for I had discarded my jacket in that little ruse de guerre, you remember. The secure lever beside my head wagged and clicked but did not allow admission. Then I heard voices, urgent voices: the Dutchman was no longer alone. An unpleasing sort of whirring, grating noise made itself heard: evidently they had got hold of some kind of electrical tool and were working on the door-handle. Had I been a religious man I should probably have offered up a brisk prayer or two, but I am proud, you see: I mean, I never praised Him when I was knee-deep in gravy so it would have seemed shabby to apply for help from a bacon-factory.

  The grating noises on the other side of the door increased: I looked about me desperately. On the wall was one of these huge electrical switches such as American Presidents use for starting World War Last. It might well set off an alarum, I thought; it might turn off all the electrical power in Mr Mycock’s bacon-factory –
certainly, it couldn’t make things worse. I heaved with all my might and closed the contacts.

  What happened was that pigs started trundling through the room. They were not exactly navigating under their own power, you understand, for they had all crossed The Great Divide or made the Great Change; they were hanging from the hooks on the endless belt, their contents had been neatly scooped out and were doubtless inhabiting the PET-FOOD ONLY: WASH HANDS AFTER HANDLING bin. They were the first truly happy pigs I had ever seen.

  The eighth – or it may have been the ninth – pig wasn’t really a pig in the strictest sense of the word; it was a large Dutchman, fully-clothed in what would be called a suit in Amsterdam. He was hanging onto a hook with one hand and seemed to have all his entrails. His other hand brandished the Browning HPM 1935, which he fired at me as he dropped to the floor, making his fourth mistake that day. The shot took a little flesh off the side of my belly – a place where I can well afford to lose a little flesh – then he aimed carefully at the pit of my belly and squeezed the trigger again. Nothing happened. As he looked stupidly down at the empty pistol I kicked it out of his hand.

  ‘That was fourteen,’ I said kindly. ‘Can’t you count? Haven’t you a spare magazine?’ Dazedly, he patted the pocket where the spare magazine nested. Meanwhile, I had picked up the Browning; I clouted him on the side of the head with it. He passed no remarks, he simply subsided like a chap who has earned a night’s repose. I took the spare magazine out of his pocket, removed the empty one from the pistol (using my handkerchief to avoid leaving misleading fingerprints) and popped it into his pocket. I cannot perfectly recall what happened then, nor would you care to know. Suffice it to say that the endless belt was still churning along with its dangling hooks and, well, it seemed a good idea at the time.

  It was now becoming colder every moment and I was shaking like any aspen, but even cowards derive a little warmth from a handful of Browning HPM with a full magazine. I awaited what might befall, regretting nothing but having wasted a perfectly good jacket. An indistinct voice shouted through the door.